Count your doves after this new "paradigm" hatches!

By Dan Bodine



A new paradigm!

“A new paradigm! it is. I'm telling 'ya, we've entered a new paradigm!”

Hee, hee. I've been hearing this new stuff since my first wife got pregnant from a Chinese Mynah bird almost 40 years ago, that day when I lost her several hours at the Waco Zoo!

We're living in a New Reality now! Expect the unexpected! all this buzz is.

But I'm still broke. Last week's doctor bills are still coming two months early. And the only way I can still stay sane is to go talk to some of my plants “out back.” Where's the Big Step Up?

I don't know what's new about all this. Other than you can “git broke” and run up doctor bills at least three times as fast now as any other time in our nation's history.

I was thinking about this riddle of new finance transformations yesterday, when I came upon a white-wing dove in our back yard. A little angry, she was.

Birds in our yard, first of all, aren't uncommon. We moved to the Las Tierras (insane) neighborhood of East El Paso over three years ago. Even then there were over 25,000 people living here, all squeezed together like angry mother-in-laws without arms. There may be 50,000 now.

But there were a lot of birds hanging around, too, making themselves at home – white-wing doves and many collared doves of some kind, really tame; fussy pigeons (more on Chief Huff-Puff Whappo later, maybe); and of course, sparrows.

Most of them, in fact, do live in the Las Tierras, I feel. On almost every house, in some nook or cranny of the roof-line, you can find their nests. The thing that bothered me though, the Las Tierras being a fairly new subdivision, was food. Where do they get it?

With very little landscaping around most of these desert houses to attract a food chain -- How far are they having to go to get food, I wondered? And then making it back here in time to sack out for the night? Jeesh! What a life, pobresitos!

Last March (2012), stressed out over three months of continuous sickness, staring at these birds daily on fences or rooftops (they strangely stay home in the winter, mostly), I upped and made God a promise.

I'll feed these damn birds for 'ya if'n you'll get me out of this sickness! Whaddaya think?

Wasn't exactly thunder or lightning that followed, and certainly no burning bush around, but I felt a gentle thump-thump in my chest. Affirmative, I took it. So off I was on the great bird project!

Lasted over a year (Yep, almost immediately my health got better, too); and damn near put me in the poor house just from buying birdseed! Forty pounds a week eventually!

But you can imagine after a month or so, where you'd find the majority of the wild birds in the Las Tierras most mornings—on fences and rooftops around ol' Bo's backyard waiting for El Whacko to come out with morning chow!

Thus I became a tad-bit unpopular among my neighbors. The poop was piling up everywhere!

In May, under the threat of a health lawsuit by the Mormon woman immediately behind me (she wadn't impressed at all that the poop may've been divine), I stopped the practice. And of course, in a few weeks, the birds had thinned back to normal.

I've always put out water for them, since moving in. Thus it's not unusual to find a half dozen or so flying around “out back” just about any time you go back there. Even now.

Coming across the white-wing yesterday was a little different though. She was walking. Casually.

Now the second of my great projects that's not sitting too well with my neighbor behind me is that I have a lot of plants. Trees, shrubs, bedding plants. Had to build some shade for them, those things, but I was up to. Barely.

But it means you must water often. Which attracts insects. In the desert, in summer, sometimes you can't go a day without watering some of the younger ones.

Thus yesterday, “out back” when I was pulling the water hose and doing my watering, I came across the white-wing.

She came ambling out from underneath a big arbor I'd built near a rear corner. Looked at me fussy-like, she did; and then ambled on over to another plant I'd already watered, and got under it. Had no intention of leaving, her attitude said.

Hmmm... I thought. She doesn't appear to be injured. No marks. What's the deal?

I continued watering, finishing up with a number of cross-Desert Willows in small pots I've kept alive since rooting 'em over winter, and was making my way with the hose back around the arbor, when she jumped out from underneath a tall cedar.

JULIETTA

And her nose stuck high-'n-mighty in the air, took her time again in ambling back across my path and underneath the arbor again to, this time, beneath a large Philodendron I've named “Julietta” in memory of a friend back in Presidio.

And this time something clicked.

This is a mama bird! I thought. A mama-in-the-making, a mama wannabe, some kind of mama! And she's either built or is building a nest back in there somewhere! … Holy cow! You know how much you can sell those little suckers for, once they're old enough you can take 'em away from her, huh!?

And then that kind of New Reality thinking was quickly chased away by some Old Reality thoughts.

You got four dogs, Bodeen! Three of 'em spend most of their time policing this back yard to make sure none of the neighbors' cats are lurking about! A mama bird wants to raise a brood back here?!!

When I turned back around to the Philodendron, she'd already walked away somewhere. But I squirted water over toward it anyway. Just to leave a message.

“Shoo!” I said “Waddaya think this back yard is?! … A'new paradigm' for 'ya!!”

Today she wasn't out there.

That's what I like about back yards and gardens.

You can still make some old-fashioned sense of things!

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