My backyard birds have flown with my mom's passing 

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During the COVID pandemic (not like it ever ended, but during the period where former President Trump was encouraging Americans to inject bleach into their bodies), people began taking up all kinds of diversions to pass the time between paranoiac coughs and sneezes and while avoiding other human beings. Those same people, if they were office workers particularly, began working from home, conducting business remotely from their home computers.

In nearly no time at all, those home workers broke into three distinct camps. The first were those who fully embraced remote work even if it meant changing dirty diapers, eating mostly takeout food and swearing they'd never return to high-tower office work. While being efficient workers of some measure, they did however spend empty hours staring out of their living room windows wondering if they'd ever again dare to breathe outdoor air. Between bouts of window staring, they continued their pace as effective nose-to-the-grindstone workers and employees, finally disabused of having to deal with co-workers who blurted out crossword puzzle answers or who actually cared who would win America's Got Talent.

The second camp comprised the folks who never wore their masks correctly—not even while laughably driving alone in their own vehicles with their masks on. They also found themselves staring out of their living room windows, but they somehow convinced themselves they could not even collect the daily mail if it had been touched by another human. This group was prone to such "death is at the doorstep" distraction that they occasionally, during Zoom meetings, mindlessly adjusted their boobs or picked their noses—while being broadcast live onto the screens of their aghast and laughing co-workers.

If you're one of those persons who lost their job because your genitals fell onto your keyboard, making you famous as a social media meme, sorry, but next time wear some underwear, OK? And put that mask on straight while you're at it.

Briefly about masks, I wore a mask most days for at least two years, and I never had hardly a cough in that period, so I hold no grudges with mask folks. I was OK with non-maskers, too, so long as they weren't expressing fake mockery about me being a mindless socialist or communist, because, you know, connect the dots: Masks equal tyranny, sayeth the idiots.

I was especially unlike former President Donald Trump, never fearing that a mask would smear my thick makeup and thus cause Americans to mock me. He did that, you know. Look it up, MAGA. He cast off his mask after seeing it smudged with all that orange face crapola and declared to his staff that he never be seen wearing one again. Americans died because we elected a vanity mirror as president.

The third camp were people like me. I'd work downtown in the office. I'd work from home. I'd be in Zoom meetings from both. I never found the right combination of being cautious or careless when it came to being among other humans, but I never shied from them. When I worked from home, I stared out the window like everyone else, but I wasn't afraid of the Amazon Prime delivery guy.

When I drove home early, I stared out the car window, too, discovering things along my now-empty commute that I'd never noticed even after driving Interstate 15 since the early 1970s. I became observant.

That led me—as it led all third COVID campers—to take up some kind of hobby. My first was to start taking twice-weekly Greek language lessons from a tutor in Athens, via Zoom, of course. I picked my guitar back up and began playing again. I found that my vegetable garden gave me new joy, especially as my daughter Eleni joined me in the dirt quest. But the hobby that really got me going was bird watching.

Until COVID, all the birds in my yard looked the same, and I called all of them sparrows, except for the American robin, only because we all know what a robin is. One day, I noticed that one of my backyard birds wore red plumage. It was a finch. Another bird kept flitting around, and I figured out it was a chickadee—still my favorite because they are tiny and brave.

I made treks to Backyard Birds—a fantastic treasure of a store in Sugar House—and figured out how to attract doves and woodpeckers (two varieties each), quail, ducks, jays, magpies, yellow finches and many more, including the Cooper's hawk that came by to make meals of my little feathered friends.

I took walks along the Jordan River Parkway where I'd scout grebes, pelicans and kestrels. I drove to Farmington Bay to find eagles, red-winged blackbirds and herons. I re-visited Tracy Aviary for the millionth time and recalled to my mother the time she and my dad took me there to see the baby vulture back in the 1950s.

We have it on 8mm film somewhere, a jumpy black-and-white recording of me and the little bugger hopping about his cage. My mom pledged to me that we'd go to the aviary this year to see him again, but that day never came, and this past August, Andy N. Condor died.

My mom, the beautiful Stella Rose, also died last week, just one day after her 96th birthday. She was enamored of my bird-watching and, for the past three years, has sent me via Facebook or Instagram Messenger pictures of exotic birds she'd find online. I'm guessing she's sent nearly 1,000 bird photos to me, wondering if I'd ever seen them in the wild. Well, no, Mom, I live in Murray, not Tibet.

No matter, they came all day, every day.

Now, they don't. I keep checking anyway.

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