I’m in love with an owl.
And judging from the dozens of people under the owl tree in Golden Gate Park, I’m not the only one.
In a towering Monterey pine across from the bison paddock, a Great Horned Owl has been nesting for several years. Sometimes she raises 2 or 3 owlets, but this year there was only one saucer-eyed fluff-muffin. The owl and her yearly brood have always had fans, but this year they achieved celebrity status.
Every time I bicycle by, there are people craning their necks, moving to a different spot to look, pointing, and telling other people where to look.
The other day, its’ a gray weekday morning, and it’s starting to rain. When I bike past the owl tree, there are only two women, on the far side of the tree, craning their necks to look.
“Can you see it?” I call out, standing with my bike.
The women stare. “Can you see the owl?” I clarify. Still no response.
Then one of the woman calls out. “Is that Erin?”
I laugh, wondering who it is. “Yep!”
“I can’t even see you but I knew it was you!”
And suddenly I, too, recognize the woman, just from her voice. Someone I went to grade school with, then high school.
We come closer, but not too close. Compare notes about the pandemic and the owl.
“I call her Queen Owl,” says my old friend.
“Perfect,” I say, thinking, the mother owl is like royalty stepping out onto a high balcony, with us, the riff-raff, craning our necks to see her.
When I peddle away in the rain, I am delighted. To have run into an old friend, and to have been treated to her view of the phenomenon that is the owl its fans.
So that encounter at the owl tree happened more than a week ago. I’m only getting around to posting now because, well, life. But it’s already old news. The owlet left home, and the mother owl hasn’t been seen for a while. I’ve biked past the tree many times since that rainy morning, and I no longer see people clustered underneath with their isolation buddies, looking up.
And because people don’t seem to truly value something until it’s slipping away or altogether gone, I miss that damned owl and its owlet. Badly. I miss the people looking up, trying to spot the two birds. I miss the people biking by, asking “Hawk?” and everyone delighted to correct that misapprehension. “No, OWL.”
So there are fewer people under the owl tree, but every day, there are more cars on the road. More “non-essential” businesses opening. More people walking down the sidewalk, with and without masks.
And I’m thinking that as things “open up,” we just might get a little nostalgic about the kind of opening up that happens under lockdown. The opening up to nature, to other people, and to the impossibly long span of days that aren’t gridded into oblivion by work, school, errands, and social engagements.
So what’s the moral of the story? I hate morals, but I can’t resist this one.
Don’t count your chickens before they hatch. But share your write about the owlet before the damned bird fledges.