Hand on a Ghost

I hope you love birds too. It is economical. It saves going to heaven.

–Emily Dickinson

FREQUENT WASHING DOESN'T MAKE THE CROW WHITER – DANISH PROVERB

Phoebe Snetsinger is 11 years old when she meets her future husband David at a 4-H club. He's 13. Since she goes to a one-room elementary school with only two other students, he probably makes more of an impression. Her father is Leo Burnett, the famous ad executive responsible for Tony the Tiger, Charlie the Tuna, the Jolly Green Giant, the Maytag Repairman, Morris the Cat, and countless other advertising icons that those of us of a certain age cannot get out of our heads. She graduates Phi Beta Kappa in German from Swarthmore. Days later, she marries David and they settle in Minneapolis. They have four kids. David is a chemist and Phoebe becomes a dutiful housewife as the times demand, but eventually realizes she is bored out of her mind.

One spring morning when Phoebe is thirty-four, a neighbor takes her out birdwatching. She sees an orange-throated Blackburnian warbler at the top of a tree and is quickly hooked. Birding with her neighbor once or twice a week in the woods around their houses gives her an outlet, and she starts a life list which grows slowly at first as she begins learning the tedious process of how to spot birds in trees and distinguish one type of bird from another. A couple years later her family moves to a St. Louis suburb where she joins a proper bird club and sharpens her skills. Her life list grows by roughly 200 new species a year as she accompanies more experienced club members, but she yearns for more exotic locales to increase her numbers. Eventually, she starts taking trips farther afield.

________

My parents like birdwatching. It doesn't have to be someplace faraway or exotic for them to enjoy the experience; Florida, Texas or even their suburban Cleveland backyard are all just fine. They aren't birders or twitchers, and they don't monitor rare species, enter competitions or keep life lists. Even if they knew the story of Phoebe Snetsinger, they wouldn't emulate her, although my father, and to a lesser extent my mother, have a good deal of wanderlust.

As a scientist, my father looks at life with curiosity and wonder. He was a machinist before WWII and the GI Bill gave him the means to go to college and graduate school, liberating him from his life in a poor immigrant family. The fact that he, a smart Jewish kid from the poor side of Philly, got to travel throughout Italy during the war, then parlay that into beating the quota system against Jews—going first to George Washington for his BS, University of Pennsylvania for his MS and PhD and finally Johns Hopkins for his post-doctoral work—must have seemed too good to be true. Years later he tells me about the "pranks" his fellow soldiers played on him as soon as he was drafted, but the way he tells the stories, I realize it's the same way I tell the stories about the "pranks" kids played on me when I was little: chasing me—the only Jew in the neighborhood—down the block with a knife, throwing ice balls filled with sharp rocks at my head, accusing me of stealing things that my father had given me. Years later, my teenaged daughter tells me, "Ma, you know you were bullied, right?" but back then we didn't give it that name. Likewise, when the soldiers under your command—who are taller and older than you—steal your shoes when having shoes can mean the difference between life and death, it's not really a prank anymore.

My parents take my sister and me on trips all over. We drive to the Yucatan from Cleveland one summer to explore ruins in the airless heat. We drive through Appalachia to experience the juxtaposition of breathtaking beauty and heartbreaking squalor. We hike through Glacier and the Tetons when bears still amble through campsites...