MORSE CODE MIDDING

Lake Michigan Diary 81

My favorite ancient word is “midding”, meaning, "having the pleasant feeling you get from being near but not in the middle of a gathering". The dictionaries tell us that the word comes from Old English, “midden”, which is the word for a garbage heap outside of your hut, and that puzzled me for a long time, but now I think it means that when you are a garbage heap outside of a hut, nobody is going to come rouse you out of your heap and ask you to participate in general hut activity—when you are finally useless garbage, you can finally relax. Emperor Nero: Worst. Midding. Ever:

Midding is the place, in the first place, in which, as a kid, you learn everything about adult life. In your sleeping bag near the campfire while everybody is roasting marshmallows close in. Your parents playing cards with the neighbors when you are in the next room pretending to snooze on the couch, a line of light coming under your door from the hallway as you listen to their dirty jokes and cocktail recipes. Kaye would put her shrieking parrot Charlie (thought to be a boy for 34 years until he laid an egg recently) to bed in per cage, then cover the cage with a sheet; we would resume socializing while the bird muttered quietly, reminding me of me as a child, on that couch. I get in my kayak in the summer on an August night and paddle along the intermittent parks hearing everybody drink the night away over on the beach.

Nowadays, midding is me a garbage heap next to the frantic life of the birds. Charlie and Ros are in Paris, and every time they go to Paris or New York, Ros packs up individual sandwich bags full of bird seed and asks me to fling the seed near that gigantic pine tree that, let’s face it, Ros, GOT AWAY FROM YOU. The trick of birdseed in bitter-cold Chicago on the lake is that the quotidian pigeons bully their way to the stuff first. I have to outwit the fat-ass pigeons to give equal time to the lil buddies. Ros and Charlie have been in Paris for six days now, and the pigeons know me and DB—they can smell the seed, air catfish gakking on the bottom-muck-chum. I’m the worst Tippi Hedren ever in this bird biz, but news flash: that gas station fire in “The Birds” was all pigeon-planned.

Photos courtesy Jobi Cates

So many birds at this unlikely time of the year! The ducks who value personal space as if standing in line at an ATM in April 2020. The baby songbirds doing hot yoga along the shore, the goose whose poop is mistaken for dog poop and for which my neighbor blames me…

The Lake Michigan birds, you guys! They are back and it’s still cold but hoorah for hollow bones! There is a new woodpecker in the neighborhood, was he blown off-course?, tapping out morse code to all of us midding dungheaps in the nabe:

Here’s the funny translation of the local woodpecker, lol!:

PLEASE I ONLY HAVE DAYS LEFT CALL AMERICAN EMBASSY THEY ARE THREATENING TO MAKE ME ALPHABETIZE BRIANS IRRELEVENT DVDS FOR THE LOVE OF GOD HELP

ROFLWTFBBQLOL woodpecker!

You guys: most of the good bird photos of this post are by Jobi Cates, and you are going to hear about her brilliance very soon, loyal friends!