I am not given to fawning on my son, and anyone who watched us discuss his carrots at dinner tonight wil agree, assuming that they will stop dialing 911 long enough to do so.
Nevertheless, I am fascinated by his talent for pattern recognition. I don't understand it, necessarily, but it rivets me, delights me, and catches me in the corners of its cloak and makes me dream of redemption.
Last week we talked about red-winged blackbirds, which are back for the spring and summer, and which are dusted in among the grackles in the treetops around our house less than a city block from a pond. I mentioned their song, a sort of "cong-a-ree" (which may be available at the above link to Cornell, or by searching, here for example). I didn't go into detail with him about it, about how it is so common in some places I have lived that it is woven into every step, and how I think of it when I smell pond muck, or the "schloop" of a cattail coming up out of where you wish it weren't. Or that I sat on the landing of the house I grew up in Richmond's Fan District and listened to it on my mother's record player, which had four legs and a grate in the front, and was a piece of furniture. No, I just said, "Listen to that; it's a red-winged blackbird."
And a week later, we walked outside, and I told him to listen, and I asked him what it was, and he said, "a red-winged blackbird," and I laughed like a madman. Carol asked what i was laughing at, and I told her, and she laughed too, although with less of a risk about the summoning of the authorities.
Joe can hear a saxophone in a wall of trumpets. He can hear a red-wing, and a great horned owl, and recently he reflected on how two books -- one by Keizaburo Tejima, and the other by Stephen Huneck, were alike. (Both use woodcuts.) I am not alone in being fascinated by these magical leaps of intuition the eye and ear and fingertip make in such sparky arcs of an instant. But I feel lucky to watch.