ΩA few weeks ago I was driving on one of the main streets in the downtown core of this Central California city/town. I grew up here so there's resonance and nuance all over the place, especially since I left while still young, and only recently moved back. I was with my mother who's 89, and likes to go for drives in the car. We were pulling up to a stoplight, a moderately busy intersection, I had noticed a woman about a half a block earlier, she had that zealot face I've learned to recognize, stern sexless disapproval, I link it with Scientology for some reason, that may be unfair I don't know, she was walking briskly and sternly away from the light we were pulling up to, which has on one corner a Foster's Freeze we ate at as a treat when I was little, and on another corner the pet shop that's been there for decades, and right then I saw, just as I was coming to a stop because of the traffic, the light change to green, and from directly overhead a large black bird, a crow or raven tumbling straight down, on its back though, wings weakly fluttering half-outspread, legs bent but pointing straight up, the bird was on its back exactly with its tail outspread and its head sort of lifted, which was very surreal, it fell directly in front of the car, maybe three feet away, I was still rolling having not come to a complete stop, but then of course I did stop, it occurred to me to get out and pick it up and carry it to the side of the road it would obviously get run over quickly it's a busy street, but then I thought it might be, probably was, ill, and that wouldn't be a good idea, then I thought about just running it over because I could make sure it wasn't suffering but it was all in that space of time between deciding to stop, stopping, and deciding to go, a few seconds, I pulled into the next lane over and went on through. Later we came back down that same street and I saw that it had been thoroughly run over many times. Later still it occurred to me it could easily have been shot. There's a whole subtext here I won't touch, involving signs and superstition and my love for the wild and its creatures.
Tonight, a cold clear evening, I was again driving my mom around, it was that time of a winter day when the light is almost gone, and if you look toward the west you can see the last smears of sunset on the clouds near the horizon, the hills become silhouettes, in fact everything to the west becomes a silhouette, dark outlines and shapes, the construction paper cut-out of reality, the detailed edge outlined and everything inside that all one black stuff, and we were coming out of a parking lot facing west, the road crosses a creek there and there are trees and bushes so that what I saw was the dark gray blue of the sky fading toward the lighter and lighter edge at the horizon and that spectrum held in a notch through the trees where the creek was and all around that the intricate shadow substance of trees and bushes with power lines running transverse off to the side and everything only those three colors, black blue and gray, though of course a thousand different shades within that and suddenly the shadow-shape of a large bird detached itself from the upper left corner of the group of trees at the center of the image and floated down through the center of it, in the gap over the creek itself, the bird shape a piece like all the rest of the darkness completely undifferentiated except by its outline and I could see its claws extended it came down slowly but straight not flapping its wings but gliding almost vertically down and then it merged with the still thicker darkness at the bottom of the scene, and by that time I'd driven too far to continue looking without stopping the car in the middle of the street.
