My family

Family Stories Vlog

READY FOR MY CLOSE UP, MR. HITCHCOCK

13 Dec 2016

Did you ever wonder what birds do during the day?

I was driving home from Sacramento today and wondered, as I have many times in the past, what birds do all day. 

These tall light posts at every major intersection are always filled with birds.  My mother counted 25-30 birds on one half of the light post to our right, which I could not photograph.

I decided they all looked like they are hoping for a remake of The Birds and are waiting for Hitchcock to stop by for an audition (I don't want to disappoint them and let them know that Hitchcock has been dead for several years.)

I have this mental image of what the crows (the thousands of crows) that live in Davis do all day long.  They nest in the trees around our house and around daybreak you can hear them all waking up.  There is calling back and forth in the trees and across the trees (at least I imagine they are calling each other)

And then, at a certain unspoken signal, they all just....leave. 

Davis is a medium sized city, but it is surrounded on all sides with fields and farms and if you drive out of Davis and into the country you can see the fields covered with birds, all digging industriously in the soil.

Around 5 p.m., the birds all fly up in a body and fly home, settling back in the trees around our house again.  In my mind, I imagine father crow getting all dressed up for work in the morning...

Maybe mom packs some worms in a bag for him and then he goes off and spends the day foraging for food before coming home again.  Maybe mom spends the day tidying up the nest (or maybe she is foraging too).

It's the ones with pie-in-the sky dreams that bypass the fields and spend their day sitting on light posts  Maybe these are the rebellious teenagers who don't want to follow in mom and dad's footsteps and prefer to sit on a corner waiting for some better job offer to come along.

Of course these are just the crows.  Think about pigeons, whose job all day is to sit in a park begging for crumbs from passersby.  Do they have trees to nest in at night, or some back alley in a dark part of town.  Or the hawks who claim part of a telephone pole to sit staring at a field, hoping a rodent will run by.

These are the things that I think about.

I'm also worried about the climate change that we are not experiencing, according to our President Elect.  I discovered today that some of our trees are very confused.  in a normal year, they blossom in January or February and in September or October, the leaves turn color, if you're lucky a brilliant yellow, red or orange, and then drop their leaves.  It is December and the trees are just now changing color, but this particular tree is quite confused:

I'm sorry that I didn't get back to this tree until dusk, and so the confusion doesn't show as clearly as it did at noon, when I first saw it.  But if you look closely you can see that the leaves on the left side, the lower part of the tree, have turned a colorful orange and yellow, but up the top on the right, is a part of the three which is already bursting into blossom!  I saw several others trees in the row where this one is that are starting to blossom, while still having autumn color in the leaves.

I'm not sure what this means right now, but it certainly is strange.

∆∆∆∆∆∆

In other news, my mother has finally had her neurological "exam."

The two doctors at the ER on her two trips there, and her PCP are all stumped about her seizures and why she keeps passing out and all three said they could only suggest she have a full neuro workup.

Her first exam had to be canceled because she felt "lousy" (until about 20 minutes after I canceled her appointment) and I rescheduled until today. I went very early about 10:30 so that when she woke up feeling "lousy" I was able to cajole her into getting dressed and coming into the living room to just sit and chat. By the time the aid came to take her to lunch, she was back to normal and felt like eating something.

She hates doctors and wanted to know if we couldn't postpone it for a couple of days, but I convinced her by telling her how much it costs her every time she has to go to the ER and, unhappily, we headed off to Kaiser in Sacramento.

Kaiser has a huge parking lot and my mother has difficulty walking, so I took her to the front door, pointed her to a bench and said she should sit down there and wait for me and I would park the car and come back.  I parked as quickly as I could, hurried back and, of course, she was not on the bench. I found her looking lost standing in the hall by the pharmacy.  She said she never heard me tell her to sit on the bench, but I think she decided not to sit there because other people were also on the bench and she didn't want to interact with strangers.

We found the Neuro department and sat down to wait.  What a waste of angst! The doctor was with us for about 10 minutes, if that. He read her records, asked a couple of questions and said the only thing he could suggest was using some anti-seizure medication, but we both agreed that the side effects might be worse than her seizures are now and we can keep that as a possibility for the future, but for now her care plan is unchanged.  He never touched her except to shake her hand.