When you are engulfed in flames - By David Sedaris Page 0,60
were secured. It was then that the birds focused their attention on the bedroom, and I had no choice but to return to the attic.
Aside from CDs, which Hugh buys like candy, his record collection is also pretty big. Most are albums he bought in his youth and shipped to Normandy against my wishes: Led Zeppelin II, Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. If it played nonstop in a skanky-smelling dorm room, he’s got it. I come home from my 5:00 walk, and here’s Toto or Bad Company blaring from the attic. “Turn that crap off,” I yell, but of course Hugh can’t hear me. So I go up, and there he is, positioned before his easel, one foot rigid on the floor and the other keeping time with some guy in a spandex jumpsuit.
“Do you mind?” I say.
I never thought I would appreciate his music collection, but the chaffinches changed all that. What I needed were record jackets featuring life-sized heads, so I started with the A’s and worked my way through the stack of boxes. The surprise was that some of Hugh’s albums weren’t so bad. “I didn’t know he had this,” I said to myself, and I raced downstairs to prop Roberta Flack in the bedroom window. This was the cover of Chapter Two, and while, to me, the singer looked welcoming, the birds thought differently, and moved on to a room that once functioned as a milking parlor. There I filled the windows with Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Joan Armatrading, and Donna Summer, who has her minuses but can really put the fear of God into a chaffinch.
The pair then moved upstairs to my office, where Janis Joplin and I were waiting for them. Bonnie Raitt and Rodney Crowell were standing by in case there was trouble with the skylights, but, strangely, the birds had no interest in them. Horizontal surfaces were not their thing, and so they flew on to the bathroom.
By late afternoon, every window was filled. The storm clouds that had appeared the previous day finally blew off, and I was able to walk to the neighboring village. The route I normally take is circular and leads past a stucco house occupied by a frail elderly couple. For years they raised rabbits in their front yard, but last summer they either ate them, which is normal in this area, or turned them loose, which is unheard of. Then they got rid of the pen and built in its place a clumsy wooden shed. A few months later a cage appeared on its doorstep. It was the type you might keep a rodent in, but instead of a guinea pig they use it to hold a pair of full-grown magpies. They’re good-sized birds — almost as tall as crows — and their quarters are much too small for them. Unlike parakeets, which will eventually settle down, the magpies are constantly searching for a way out, and move as if they’re on fire, darting from one end of the cage to another and banging their heads against the wire ceiling.
Their desperation is contagious, and watching them causes my pulse to quicken. Being locked up is one thing, but to have no concept of confinement, to be ignorant of its terms and never understand that struggle is useless — that’s what hell must be like. The magpies leave me feeling so depressed and anxious that I wonder how I can possibly make it the rest of the way home. I always do, though, and it’s always a welcome sight, especially lately. At around 7:00 the light settles on the western wall of our house, just catching two of the hijackers and a half-dozen singer-songwriters, who look out from the windows, some smiling, as if they are happy to see me, and others just staring into space, the way one might when listening to music, or waiting, halfheartedly, for something to happen.
The Man in the Hut
A single road runs through our village in Normandy, and, depending on which direction you come from, either the first or the last thing you pass is a one-story house — a virtual Quonset hut — made of concrete blocks. The roof is covered with metal, and large sheets of corrugated plastic, some green and others milk-colored, have been joined together to form an awning that sags above the front door. It’s so ugly that the No Trespassing sign reads as an insult. “As if,” people say. “I mean, really.”