Hi, this is Frank Flaherty. Welcome to Park Slope, Brooklyn, for a new episode of “Dad, Interrupted.”
This week I’d like you to step inside my front yard. It’s where I putter. That may not sound like much, but for me it is.
Like most people, I spent the middle years of life sprinting in efficient, ruthlessly straight lines, zipping from school to work to parenting to the grocer’s to the in-laws to the mechanic’s to the other in-laws.
But in semi-retirement, I’ve learned, I can MEANDER. My days can loop around in big, lazy, wasteful, time-gobbling curves. And the front yard is where I do it. I yack with friends, paint a flowerpot, scan the gossip in the New York Post. Whatever strikes my fancy. My favorite verb now is “mosey around.”
But as my wife, Jeanette, will tell you, I harbor strong workaholic impulses. While I love the idea of puttering, I find it hard to do. I’ve always carried around a checklist of chores in my head. That’s why Jeanette will look at me when I seem harried and say, Dolce far niente. Apparently, that’s Italian for “It’s sweet to do nothing.”
So, being me, haha, I’ve put doing nothing … on my to-do list! And I’m making some progress. I’ve even discovered that you can learn important stuff when you’re just puttering around. That’s what happened one day in my front yard a couple summers ago.
Everyone should learn the art of the meander — especially all you Type A’s out there. Come into my yard and chill.
I call this episode, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.”
We refer to the space in front of our house as “the front yard” but it’s probably more accurate to call it a “yardette.” It’s only 17 feet wide by 13 feet long, and one-third of that space is occupied by our stoop.
But in our house we believe that “small” is just another word for “cozy.” We have a round, fire-engine-red table that we’ve set up in the yardette, and it’s big enough for a phone, a cup of coffee, a book, and it has two chairs, one yellow and one blue. I can sit and read, and, if the spirit moves me, I can water our three tiny flowerbeds and top off the birdbath.
I can also watch the many people who troop down our sidewalk. This parade is entertaining and motley and multilingual. There are dog walkers, can and bottle collectors, delivery guys and nannies with prams. There are Wall-Street-bound finance bros, and prepsters off to the Berkeley-Carroll School. And there are the aging hippies limping toward the Park Slope Food Coop, where they get their fix of political disputation and organic basil.
One day a couple of summers ago, I sat down at the tiny table and looked meditatively at the one bluestone paver that’s come loose. That’s not bad for a patio we laid in 1993. Unfortunately this one wobbly paving stone sits smack in the middle of the gate area, so everyone coming to or leaving our house walks on it. It needs to be recemented, but it’s the oldest undone chore in our house and I feel sentimental about it.
It’s also one way I’m trying to ignore the to-do list in my head. Dolce far niente.
I will admit I did sweep the sidewalk that day. But that job is not on my checklist; it’s on our wonderful neighbor’s. Her name is Millie. While I like to see leaves lying on the sidewalk — I think the city needs more nature, not less — Millie prefers the sidewalk to be spick and span. And if we don’t sweep our sidewalk, Millie will sweep it for us.
The problem is that Millie was 101 years old then, and to have a centenarian sweep our sidewalk would just not be right. So I sweep it.
After I put away the broom I headed to the red table to fire up my laptop. I wanted to do some Googling. Because Jeanette is one of those MSNBC Moms, I have seen the footage of Jan. 6 a bajillion times. But a week earlier, a friend of our son Patrick told me something I’d never known about the Jan. 6 attack. I wanted to check it out — in a puttering, idle-curiosity kind of way, of course.
There are miles and miles of Jan. 6 footage on the web, of course, so I had to scroll past lots of clips I’d seen before — the gallows intended for Mike Pence, the wacko sitting with his feet on Nancy Pelosi’s desk, the various goofballs wearing animal pelts.
When I was about 10 minutes into this, I heard angry squawking coming from our living room. This was not unusual. It was Micky-Without-An-E, our perky cockatiel. If I sit in the front yard without him — he can see me through the window — he’ll screech until I bring him outside. So I hauled out his cage and put it on the stoop, where he has a front-row seat for the sidewalk parade of passersby.
It's a Brooklyn tradition to sit on your stoop and watch the world go by. That’s more Dolce far niente.
Micky loves the sidewalk parade, and the sidewalk parade loves Micky. Even the friskiest puppy will sit stock still for long minutes to watch this strange bird with the orange spots on his cheeks. People chirp at him, and he chirps right back, and in these interspecies conversations what really gets a rise out of people is when he pops up the crest of feathers on his head. It looks like the cockatiel version of a raised eyebrow.
Also popular is when he bobs his head. Why he does this I have no clue, but I do know that his bobbing gave him his name. Patrick named him after Micky Ward, a light welterweight boxer from Boston who bobbed and weaved very well. So well, in fact, that Mark Wahlberg starred in a biopic about him called “The Fighter.”
All eyes are usually on Micky’s antics, but the human antics are interesting, too. Probably half the people, kids and grownups, will bob their heads back when Micky bobs his. And some parents use Micky as a teaching opportunity, explaining to their kids that Micky is a parrot, or a parakeet, or a canary. I feel conflicted about correcting them in front of their kids. Sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t.
The one downside to putting Micky on the stoop is his wolf whistle.
We think he learned it from a Nickelodeon show. It’s one of his go-to chirps, so we hear it often inside the house. But when he’s outside on the stoop he’s more audible, and he’s also partly hidden by the stoop railing and by our camellia bush. So some people hear the whistle but don’t see him. They see only … me. If he wolf-whistles when a young woman happens to be strolling by and she looks at me, I may have some explaining to do. If she’s with her boyfriend, the explaining may take a little longer.
This hasn’t happened often, but it’s happened more than once.
After I settle Micky on the stoop I mosey back to the table and scroll through more Jan. 6 clips. I find my two favorite scenes — Sen. Josh Hawley stars in both. In the first, Hawley is outside the Capitol, in full view of the soon-to-be rioters. He raises a fist in solidarity with them, riling them up, much to the dismay of the police manning the barricades. In the second clip, taken shortly after the rioters breach the building, Hawley is hightailing it like a scared rabbit down a Capitol corridor, presumably to find a spidey hole to hide in.
What a lowlife. If a samurai did this in Japan, wouldn’t he have to commit seppuku? Just asking.
I watch these clips a bunch of times, riling myself up, but in a good way. It’s good to keep evil straight in front of you. Know your enemy.
Finally I found the clip I was looking for. It takes place in the Capitol’s National Statuary Hall, an amphitheater-like space that is ringed by 35 statues. Through the middle of it runs a narrow velvet-rope walkway. As seen in the clip, once the rioters reached the hall they did an amazing thing: They walked only within the roped-off pathway. They didn’t kick down the rope posts or race pell-mell around the room, or whack the statues. They walked meekly along the authorized path, just like obedient tourists.
The clip is funny. But it’s also not surprising. These guys had revolution on their minds that one day, but, like all of us, they’d spent a lifetime of days waiting in orderly lines at schools, stadiums and movie theaters. So when they entered National Statuary Hall, their muscle memory kicked in.
We humans are strange. Even if we want to revolt, we’ll drive on the right side of the road to do it. Color inside the lines, we were told as kids, and for many if not most things in life, we keep doing it.
Now it was dinnertime. I lifted Micky’s cage up to ferry him back to the living room.
But when I hoisted his cage, I noticed that its door was wide open. It’s a sketchy door, the latch is untrustworthy, so it may have popped open by itself. Or maybe one of Micky’s young fans that day had somehow set it ajar. There was no way to know how long it had been open.
But the thing is this: Micky hadn’t flown out. He wasn’t anywhere near the open door. Maybe it’s out of bounds according to the little velvet ropes he sees in his cockatiel brain.
I closed his cage door, stepped on the loose bluestone, and took us both back inside.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings