The Cardinal’s Catechism

The cardinal is an avid preacher.

As I sat on the sofa, hunched over the laptop, trying to make words appear on a screen, worrying, he came to the back window to admonish me. “Chip chip! Chip chip!”

I put down the laptop. I opened my camera app on the phone. I tiptoed to the dining room, hugging the wall like a spy in a terrible movie. I leaned towards the pane just a bit, with my camera out, ready to snap a photo, but as usual, I wasn’t fast enough. The bright red bird and his drab brown mate fluttered away from the pile of sunflower heads as soon as I got too close. They jumped to the living sunflower plants, and then fled to the electrical wire.

I’ve learned how to get the best possible display on my sunflowers. The Mammoth Gray Stripes only ever provide one great big flower and then keel over, but the Autumn Beauty, the Velvet Queen and the Lemon Queen keep blooming. They send out branches like a clothes tree, each with at least one bud, and they bloom more readily if you’re proactive about cutting off the wilted flowers. Some of my big tall stalks now have five or six buds on a single branch, instead of one on each branch. They just keep going, after two months, a fireworks display in living petals, and I keep on cutting the wilted heads off to make them bloom more. Next year, I will improve the display by planting Mammoth Gray Stripes in peat pots every few weeks, so that every time an old Mammoth droops I’ll have new Mammoths ready to plant in their place, and the garden will be lovelier than ever.

I heaped my dead sunflower heads on the weird black outcropping at the side of my house, meaning to dry them and save seeds. The house is a boxy 1920s foursquare, but people have been building appendages on it for the past century. The laundry room is much younger than 100 years, and juts out from the back. A concrete porch looks like it came from the 70s, and juts out from the laundry room. A concrete planter, too shallow and full of old shingle to grow anything but weeds, juts from the porch. In the corner to the side of the planter is my compost heap, discreetly hidden by a giant patch of kale. And to the side of the compost heap is a four-foot protuberance that doesn’t exactly serve a purpose. I think there used to be a hatch to the cellar there. Now there’s a cinder block square, with old bricks and construction waste stored in it, which isn’t quite sealed properly; stray cats sometimes find an egress to the cellar in the back of it and come upstairs to the kitchen. The square doesn’t have a real roof, just wooden joists covered over with a sheet of black roofing material. It’s not quite strong enough for a human to stand on. But it’s a good platform for drying sunflowers.

The birds found my sunflower drying platform and decided that it was a buffet.

The cardinals are the boldest. They get right up close to the window and preach at me. The male in his bright red cassock is not as insistent as his drab brown mate, whom I named Pope Junia. Pope Junia preaches the loudest of all. Several times a day, I hear them preaching “Chip chip!” at me, and come to the window to try and take a photo, and they flee. But there is also a bright male goldfinch, and his drab brown mate. Goldfinches are a bit smaller and less bossy than cardinals. They come by after the clergy have finished eating, and I often miss them because they don’t preach as loudly. There is a pair of robins that prefer to hop on the grass eating the seeds that the other birds spray. They made a nest over the backdoor of the haunted house. I had their fledglings trying out their wings in the yard earlier this year. And of course, there are those pigeons who ruined my gutters. I ought to shoo them off, but I never do.

I still don’t know what that odd black rectangle is supposed to be, but it’s an excellent bird feeder.

I don’t think I’ll save a single seed at this rate.

It’s such a dizzying thing for me to get used to: being happy. I’ve had an unhappy life for the longest time. There’s plenty still wrong and so much that I want t be better. But for the past ten months or so, I’ve found myself learning to be happy.

Suppose there was an eternal Being, outside of time, watching time all at once like an army general looking down at a map on his desk. And suppose that the Being was also imminent, here, inside of me and inside of the garden and inside of the sunflowers, closer to me than I am to my own self, suffering with me, waiting with me, not being able to stand it with me. Let’s say the Being couldn’t take it anymore and declared that by the time I was forty I’d start to have a bit of fun and contentment, and maybe it would even continue to get better from there, so They could be happy with me instead of miserable with me. Suppose the being’s name was God, and God said “let birds fly across the vault of the sky,” and somewhere millions of years ago, some of the beings that were creeping out of the primordial muck started to evolve wings, and God saw that they were very good and sent them to me through history. Imagine that about four thousand years ago, the people who lived on this continent started cultivating colorful sunflowers in their gardens to attract the birds so they wouldn’t peck at the maize, and God rejoiced, and sent some of those sunflowers to me through the years. Have faith with me and imagine that a little over a hundred years ago, just before the stock market crash, a middle class family ordered the frame for a foursquare house from the Sears and Roebuck catalog, and paid workmen to put it together, and God was thrilled and decided I would rent that house someday. Suppose that God knew the craftsman who built the stupid black box on the side of the house, and the hungry cardinal who first noticed the sunflower heads left out to dry, and saw that they were good. And then there was me, listening to the birds outside my window, not perfectly happy but learning to be happy, healing a little. And here was God, happy in me.

I went out after the heat of the day slacked off, to water the garden. The bright red cardinal was there when I rounded the side of the house. He hopped onto the neighbors’ fence.

“Chip chip!” he harangued.

“What do you know?” I countered, impervious to the preaching.

“Chip chip!” he insisted.

I unrolled the hose. “If you say so.”

“Chip chip!”

“I don’t believe a word of it.”

He fled when I started the water.

Life is good.