Naming Nature’s Sounds
/The Boston Globe
I wake to birdsong these days, to trills and cheeps and caws, a chorus that begins in the dark. It doesn't obliterate the noise of traffic and trains and planes and sirens. But I hear the birds first and I wake up smiling.
I don't know what kinds of birds are singing, but my friend Anne does. She can identify them by their sounds. Sometimes I'll walk outside midday and call her and say, "What bird is this?" and I'll hold the phone high in the air and she'll tell me. And I'll repeat the name, once, twice, three times, then hang up and forget.
Why is this? I've lived on this earth a long time. How is it possible that I don't know who's hooting and who's howling? I can distinguish by sight a robin from a blue jay and a cardinal from a crow. But that's about it. I'm like this with all of nature, barely smarter than a first-grader, never mind a fifth-grader.
I say tree instead of oak because I'm unsure of even the basics. I don't know the names of constellations. I don't know the difference between a frog and a toad. I hardly know a gerbil from a hamster. God went to all the trouble of making species and galaxies, sets and subsets, and I point like a toddler to the sky and say, "Look at that yellow bird.”
I took my grandson Adam, who is just 3, to Petco the other day. We love Petco. It's the Arnold Arboretum of pet stores. There are labels everywhere explaining and identifying rodents, fish, snakes, even spiders.
It was the fish, tanks and tanks of them, that made me realize how little I know. Once upon a time there were just goldfish for sale. You went to Woolworth's or Kresge's, bought a small oval bowl, a little fish food, and a bright yellow fish, which you carried home in a plastic bag full of water. You fed the fish and made faces at it until it died, then you buried it in your backyard or flushed it down the toilet.
After which the whole process, minus the fish food and bowl, began again.
Now, although you can get a goldfish at Petco, you can also get hundreds of other fish, Nemos and Dories and Marlins, so many different and beautiful creatures with so many different and beautiful names, and all of them new, not just to Adam but to me too.
On the way home, we stopped at the library and got a children's book, "My Visit to the Aquarium," for both of us to read. On just one page we saw banner fish and lookdown fish and trigger fish and an emperor angelfish and four four-eyed butterfly fish and a blue-ringed angelfish and a blue chromis.
Who knew?
You'd think that human beings would pay more attention to all the life and beauty that's in this world. I see it now, of course, some of it, what's right in front of me, because it's spring and the earth is like a manic magician pulling unexpected delights out of its straw hat. Green trees. Reds and pinks and purple azaleas. Blue sky. Sweet air.
You can't ignore all of this.
But what soars above me? What lives in the sea? What grows outside my yard in places hidden to me? What exists a half a world away and what lives just down the street at a pet store?
I think I have given this world short shrift.
Maybe you don't have to know the names of things to appreciate them. Maybe just looking and seeing is enough.But sometimes we don't see. Children open our eyes. They ask questions. "What's that, Mimi?" They lead you to Petco.
I will teach Adam this summer and he will teach me. And we will learn together the names of things, the proper names, not yellow bird but yellow warbler, and not giant tree but monarch o
