6. Ornithology
Like,
you can’t do a story on bird watching.
—Stephanie
Foo
The sound is haunting, constant,
repeated. It comes from far off in the bush, then closer, as if answered in
kind.
“Work
harder,” says Fausto, smiling, interpreting. Work harder. Work harder. Work harder.
The command takes me back forty years,
to Los Angeles, at Disneyland with our two daughters and my aunt. We’re not
working harder; instead, we’re sitting in a small open train car, or maybe it’s
a boat, moving through a dark tunnel. Puppets dance in the scenes as we pass
through, smiling, happy, singing, puppets. The tune and lyrics enter my brain, sort
of like some infectious worm, never to leave: It’s a small world after all.
Even as Fausto translates the incessant call, that music, those words, and the
happy puppets move through my head as if I were once again a young parent with
kids in tow. What is it about certain sounds, I wonder, that makes them so
infective, so memorable, rather like your mother’s voice, reading a nursery rhyme
as she held you on her lap? Or an African dove telling you you’re not working
hard enough?
“Drink
lager,” Fausto says, providing an alternate translation. “In the morning,
it’s work harder; as you get into the
afternoon, it’s time to drink lager.”
Drink lager. Drink lager. Drink lager.
Now that’s more like it, I think. The doves have their daily schedule down pat.
Of all the sounds collected during this brief time in Africa—far-off lions in
the night, hippos snorting, also in the night but not so distant, that
elephant’s ears slapping back against her head as the dust billows up—it’s that
dove’s command that joins my mother’s voice and Disney’s notes as one more
never-ending tape playing constantly, even as I’m over the Atlantic Ocean,
heading home, or driving across the prairies, going somewhere American. Work harder then drink lager. Makes sense. The keys to success and happiness
delivered by a dove.
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