spoiler: and the pigeon lived happily ever after

although I hope it gets whatever the pigeon equivalent of therapy is

Three members of our household, and one neighborhood pigeon, had a highly dramatic start to our Sunday morning.

(hi! let’s just pretend like it’s been fewer than five months since I last sent a newsletter and move on)

I need to brag about my dog this morning, and since I’m taking time off every social media platform at the moment, here I am in your inbox.

I woke up at 5 a.m. and decided to put Woodrow outside to pee. It’s looking like another gorgeous day out there. The sun’s not up yet but you can tell already that sunrise is going to be one of those memorable ones. Now, here, I wish to do a metaphor about either the perfect fruit smoothie or rock concerts, and I can’t decide which because great sunrises are both, so please just imagine a Jamba Juice fronting at the Foo Fighters show.

We were in the garden all day yesterday (when I wasn’t writing, that is), so today, my entire body hurts. I planted a new clematis, and I pulled up half the potato plants from the center planter. We made the mistake of planting potatoes a few years ago, and although we were super proud of the first crop of potatoes (urban potato farmers! can you even), now, no matter how many times we remove potatoes from our garden, the potatoes keep coming back every spring and fall like some sort of terrifying eldritch curse but in complex starch form.

While Woodrow was outside, I sort of collapse-melted onto our couch to wait for him, owing to all the tiredness and potato cursebreaking.

I heard a big “THUNK.”

We bought some new plants and trees yesterday, so my first assumption was that something had fallen over, and I got up to investigate.

By the patio door was a stunned pigeon, sort of flapping around and looking disconsolate, like “hey who put the giant trick mirror in my way, what the shit, Lana.”

This has happened at our place once before. It was sad the first time also. That time, it was a tiny finch, and it hit the door, then sat around for like an hour. When I started to worry it was going to get dehydrated just sitting there, I did a bunch of Googling, prepared a cardboard box and got brave enough to grab a towel and attempt to catch it.

The second I got near it with the towel, it flew off.

But this time, it wasn’t a little finch, it was a full-grown pigeon.

As you’ll recall, Woodrow was outside. He too had heard the thunk noise, and he too came over to investigate.

Now, as has been canvassed in my writing many times over, my dog, as a cocker spaniel, is highly motivated by interest in — and attendant distrust and hatred of — birds. This is universal. Every bird, every time. Case in point: right now, as I write this, he is running up and down the patio barking derangedly at some loudly honking Canada geese who have had the temerity to land on our building several times this morning.

But anyway, earlier, Woodrow came over to investigate the thunk noise just as I opened the patio door. Things happened quickly. The pigeon flapped unhappily but couldn’t yet fly because it had just crashed into the window seconds before. Its wings, I noticed, were both sticking out at crazy angles.

Woodrow jumped and made a grab for the bird as it tried to fly away, and he caught it. This must have been one of the crowning moments of his life, as he was of course operating solely on instinct. Before he grabbed it, I was already screaming “COME, NO, DROP, NOOO WOODROW” and do you know what?

He dropped it. There were a few scrabbling, traumatic seconds of bird vs. dog, but when he clocked that I was yelling in a “do not ignore” voice, he dropped the bird, came inside, and sat next to me.

That is how good my dog is, people. He overrode his “smash all birds to the ground 4ever” reptile programming, and he came inside. And sat next to me.

I was still screaming (“Grant! Help! I need you! Please! PIGEON!”) and Grant stumbled out of our bedroom and heard me shrieking (“Grant! There’s a bird! Help!”) so he went on the patio and observed, not wanting to spook the pigeon any further.

It flap-hopped over to the corner of our patio and sat there, perhaps tallying up the number of feathers it lost in the skirmish (no fewer than 24, though some may have blown away in the interim).

Grant, knowing we humans often do more harm to wildlife than good when we try to help them, decided to just leave it alone and see how it would do if it had a cocker-spaniel-less second to calm down.

I had gone inside and gotten on the ground in child’s pose, and as the adrenaline subsided I started crying, so when Grant came back inside, I sobbed “ARE HIS WINGS BROKEN?” and “WOODROW GRABBED HIM AS HE TRIED TO FLY AWAY” and so on.

Grant affirmed that his wings seemed okay — he had folded them back in and was just sitting quietly, not moving, probably downloading the pigeon version of the Calm app and trying to get its heart back into its chest cavity.

I took Woodrow downstairs for a walk so we could both work out some nervous energy (me more than him, honestly. I think he had had a capital morning.) and then we came back upstairs and tried to sleep for another 90 minutes or so.

When we got out of bed, Grant went to the window to check on the pigeon.

Worryingly, it was still sitting in the same place. But as soon as it saw Grant through the window, it started, and flew away.

And I assume is, even as we speak, regaling all of its pigeon friends with its tale of survival in the face of some real type 3 fun.

Anyway, here he is, folks, the greatest, gentlest, un-pigeon-murderingest dog in the entire UNIVERSE:

pigeons murdered in cold blood today: 0 treats to be awarded today: infinite

short, sweet, and a little creepy

The perfect newsletter, my friends!

So here’s a little late-creepy-season story for you. It has a heartwarming component, but it is, make no mistake, pretty creepy.

A couple weeks ago, I was fast asleep and enjoying a dream about Mary Poppins characters flying in formation around my patio.

Then I start to hear Grant saying, “Hey, Angela, wake up, wake up, I have something so funny to tell you.”

So I begin to pull myself out of my dream state and into waking life. This is a real thing that I do and have lifelong practice at doing that because I occasionally get sleep paralysis, and I always need to will myself to wake myself up so I can move again.

Once I’m awake, I say, out loud to our silent bedroom, “Okay, what is it?”

Grant, next to me, immediately starts mumbling in response. I catch the words “bowling ball” and “song” and “funny.”

I am more awake now. I say, “Wait, what? What are you telling me?”

There’s a bit of a pause. I can tell Grant is confused.

GRANT
What? What’s happening?

ANGELA
You wanted to tell me something funny?

GRANT
Uh…

ANGELA
You just said something about a bowling ball and a song?

GRANT
Uh…

ANGELA
…

GRANT
Um, I’m not sure why I was telling you that. I think I was dreaming, sorry. It seemed really funny for some reason.

But now I’m confused. He woke me up!

OR DID HE?!

Slowly, we piece together that what has happened, in real life, is that:

1. Grant had a funny dream about a singing bowling ball (or a funny song about a bowling ball)

2. SIMULTANEOUSLY, I had a dream wherein Grant was in bed next to me saying, “Hey wake up, I have something funny to tell you.”

Soooo not for nothing y’all but PSYCHIC DREAM LINK. ASTRAL PLANE SOUL JOURNEY HIGH-FIVE!

n.b. Grant decidedly doesn’t believe in that sort of thing, whereas I’m more in the “there are infinitely many things about the world that I do not understand, such as mirror neurons and Below Deck” camp, but we both had to admit it was a very weird way to wake up.

AND NOW FOR A BONKERS PICTURE OF A RAINBOW FROM YESTERDAY

I was driving home yesterday and clocked that there was a lot of super pretty light breaking through from one solitary point in the clouds, after a long period, several days at least, of rain upon rain upon rain. I got home and saw this dramatic situation starting to unfold outside our windows, and without shedding my coat or even my purse, I ran outside to start cooing over it and filming what cannot really be filmed.

As you can tell, this perfect rainbow was too big for me to capture in one frame, but it was your classic, unbelievable double-rainbow-all-the-way-across-all-the-WAY situation. (That happy video is REALLY worth a revisit if you haven’t watched it lately, btw. And for more on how the internet used to be a lot more awesome when we all simultaneously obsessed over the same weird things, there’s this.)

For those of you who don’t live in Vancouver and didn’t see this in real life, just remember that at least your towns probably occasionally get doses of sunlight in winter! And for those who do live in Vancouver, it’s worth remembering: Our payoff for putting up with the endless rain is that sometimes the rain breaks and it randomly does THIS.

What’s that? You won’t believe me unless you get to see the left half of the rainbow? Tsk. All right. For the sake of journalistic integrity, then:

I stood outside losing my mind over this for as long as it lasted, which was about 15 minutes.

Shared pictures of the rainbows on one of my WhatsApp groups today have led to Vancouver-Narnia comparisons, which has allowed me to unsheath my deeply felt and previously uncharted opinion that the only true villain in the Narnia series is that creepy, child-hating sex predator, Uncle Andrew. Everyone else was just a victim of their traumatic circumstances, but Uncle Andrew was a redemptionless goon. I have a lot of strong feelings about this, apparently, particularly for someone who has never voiced an opinion about Narnia villains before. Anyway, WHOMST WILL FIGHT ME AND MY EXTREMELY CORRECT OPINION ABOUT THE 71-YEAR-OLD FANTASY SERIES

PEOPLE: THEY’RE DIFFERENT!

Are we noticing that the people in our lives whom we’re beginning to reconnect with for the first time since March 2020 all seem a little different than we remember? This is a strange byproduct of this time. None of our Selves are ever frozen in amber, obviously, but we often see each other more often and change alongside each other, in tandem, like seaweed.

(N.B. I do not know anything about seaweed, it was just the first thing I thought of when I tried to think of an organism out there that probably faultlessly coregulates with others of its phyllum anyway included on my 2021 bucket list is decidedly not “become more of an expert on free-floating marine plants,” so I’m just going to leave this metaphor recklessly in place and trust that if anyone tries to correct me on my “all of humanity is kelp” impulse, I can probably outrun them or at the very least redirect them toward extremely cute photos of my dog.)

I can feel my own Self to have radically altered since the start of the pandemic, and I can assume everyone else has been on a similar journey of introversion and reinvention, but this shows up most obviously when I reconnect with acquaintances.

And what I’m noticing is a general seriousness. Almost an awkwardness. This is across the board, across many different personality types, genders, ages, dispositions. But if I dig, I don’t think it is really awkwardness. I think there is simply less flippancy. There’s a universal disinclination to showboat or waste time, and consequently, there are more pauses where we might have previously rushed in to fill conversational gaps up with nonsense. So there is less frou-frou, less fluff, less chipper cheeriness. Is this uncomfortable? Because there is also a quietude, and a reticence, and a thoughtfulness. It is neither all bad nor all good.

And who knows. This might have more to do with a wavelength shift inside me and the kinds of frequencies I’m tuning into now, or it might really be a more general sea change. (THANK YOU, THE SEA CHANGE PUN WAS NOT INTENTIONAL BUT I AM GLAD I’M STICKING WITH MY IDEA ABOUT COMPARING HUMANITY TO SEAWEED, THANK YOU AGAIN.)

I’d be curious to know your experiences. To me, it feels like the trauma of the time, the marks it’s left on all of us, are just beginning to show themselves now, for worse, yes, but maybe also for better.

LINKS FOR YOUR LIFE

• WHO DID THIS. (okay it’s the person who owns that YouTube account, but still: WHO DID THIS)

• Here’s a very good thing about Paul Simon, greatest living songwriter. (hat tip to Nat)

• Find your chronotype and learn when to do shit in your day.

• I 100,000% loved learning about the Harriets of the world. (hat tip to Allison)

• A follow up on the Bad Art Friend. (Hat tip to Kate)

• The Indicator Light from Jeff Warren at Calm is one of the best meditations I’ve ever listened to.

• A true 2021 story if ever I saw one: The Crypto-Trading Hamster, Mr. Goxx.

• For my fellow Bake-Off fans, here’s an old Tumblr account featuring Mary Berry biting into things.

• A gorgeous map of major world languages (hat tip to Amandine)

• On burnout, something many of us are probably struggling with, this epic line: Limitless choice debilitates far more than it liberates.

• If you enjoy magical ephemera, you should check out this Ricky Jay story on his massive collection, which is, visually, very yummy. It’s no double rainbow, but it’s close.

• I was reminded this morning during one of my entrepreneurship mentoring sessions of Juicero, the hilarious startup from back in 2017 that raised a bunch of money for a machine that squeezed bags of juice into a glass more slowly than you could if you cut the back open and squeezed them with your own hands. Juicero was basically the Fyre Festival of smoothie making. I found this article, which makes the point that some tech innovations are just foxy, slick rebrands of things women have already invented, like Soylent vs. Slim Fast. Back in the late 90s, when I was a baby vegetarian waiting tables at a mall-based casual eatery called Ruby Tuesday, I used to subsist almost entirely on Slim Fast and spinach artichoke dip. Shout out to Slim Fast for keeping me going through all those double shifts and late nights.