Birding with Yeats: A Mother's Memoir (9 page)

While Yeats memorized their numbers I looked for other birds. There were plenty of them, a bounty of red-winged blackbirds and
song sparrows
,
American goldfinches
and robins. I saw something land at the top of the fence and then quickly disappear into the bushes. Something grey and nearly as large as a robin. I described it to Yeats, who said, “
grey catbird
” My first grey catbird, so named for its mewling call.

We stood for a long time looking into the enclosed pond. We were on a covered dock, sheltered from wind and sun. It was a little like looking out at a diorama. We saw painted turtles on logs, frogs swimming between lily pads, catbirds flying from tree to tree, and these giant white swans swimming gracefully and nudging one another’s necks.

All these common yellowthroats clinging sideways to the sky. All these swooping barn swallows. We sat on a bench along one of the walkways and waited some more. This was one of those scenes most of my friends couldn’t envision: a teenaged boy sitting on a bench in a marsh with his mother, waiting for birds to come, no coercion involved.

We spoke very little. We raised our binoculars now and again, or drank from our water bottles. There were butterflies and frogs and crickets singing in the grass. We had nowhere to go and nothing to do. It was perfect.

FIVE

IN THE FALL OF
2
008
we celebrated the bookstore’s one-year anniversary by taking the staff out to dinner, all ten of us including our four children. Ben delivered a speech thanking everyone and we raised a toast to a fine first year. But it was a difficult time to be a small-business owner, to say nothing of trying to sell books. The markets had crashed, companies were shedding staff, the Canadian dollar was riding high. The media was full of stories of people living beyond their means, living on credit and deeply in debt. It was a fearful time and we weren’t immune, as far as the business went. Everyone was looking for a deal, but we couldn’t discount our books the way the big-box retailers could. (They couldn’t, either, as it turned out. Actual books became a fraction, maybe as little as a quarter, of these giant shops’ stock.) Nor could we compete with online retailers who offered books at a huge discount and delivered them to your house the next day, though we were happy to deliver, for free, in the downtown core.

As bleak as the outlook seemed for bookstores, with e-readers and other media joining the online shops in competing for people’s time and money, Ben was optimistic.

“People have been predicting the demise of books since the advent of television, since before that,” he said. “It hasn’t happened yet and it won’t happen this time, either.”

He figured if we could get through this — an economic recession just a year after we opened in the heart of the financial district — we’d survive anything.

The first display I made in September was right in the entrance of the shop: a lovely selection of books about Zen and other forms of Buddhism. People were coming in for solace, looking for a sanctuary from the bad news out there, and I figured some of them needed to remember to breathe. We sold quite a few books from that display.

The biggest change for the family, however, was that Danielle went off to university. She was living in residence at King’s College at the University of Western Ontario. This was in London, just down the
401
, but it seemed like the other side of the country. Yeats missed her every single day. Danielle was Yeats’s closest confidante, the person he could trust above all others with whatever he was thinking and dreaming, and now she’d committed herself to life in London for four years.

We missed her, too. She took the bus home for the occasional weekend, but everyone wanted a part of her — us, her mother, all her girlfriends — and we had to be content with a quick meal. She and Yeats spent dinner together comparing notes on Jarvis teachers. They talked about Yeats’s new English teacher, Mr. Dewees. Yeats said Mr. Dewees was the first teacher who’d inspired him to
want
to work hard and to do well.

I asked him how this teacher differed from the others and he shrugged and said, “He just cares so much. He loves what he’s doing. He makes it fun, but he expects a lot from us.”

Danielle nodded and said, “He was like that for me, too. I took that Classics course not because I wanted to read those books, but because people told me he was an amazing teacher. He was. I never really expected to be so turned on by
The Odyssey
. I tried really hard in that course.”

Yeats also talked about his art teacher, Mr. Simpson, who ran a creative, fun classroom. Yeats spent extra hours in the art room, learning how to stack the firing kiln and helping Mr. Simpson with displays and clean-up.

Yeats had never been into the party scene and that didn’t change in high school. He didn’t need to have something to do with friends on Friday and Saturday nights. The time spent in the art room, along with the poetry club, seemed to fill his social requirements, for the time being at least.

Showing my maternal concern I’d say, “Yeats, why don’t you call one of your friends? Go to a movie or something. Have them over.”

“Why would I do that? I get enough of them at school. Besides, all the movies my friends want to see are too violent or dumb.”

“Maybe you could choose the movie. Maybe it would be fun to hang out with your friends. Go to a café in Kensington.”

“I’m fine, Mom. You don’t have to worry.”

I should have known how he felt, loving solitude as I did, but in my teenaged years I was very social. I worried about my boy.

Titus and Rupert were living together in an apartment a bit east of us and since Rupert worked in the store, Ben and I saw him frequently. But Yeats was on a different schedule. Sometimes he came down to the store after school and read in the office or re-shelved the travel books, which always seemed to get out of order. He and Rupert would have a visit and sometimes they went off together to sell books at an event. Or maybe Yeats went off with Ben to sell books, or maybe he came home with me and we ate dinner and watched an old movie.

I had taken to renting Cary Grant movies, which we watched on the desktop computer on our third floor. And nearly every Friday night that fall, Ben joined us to watch something old and, hopefully, amusing. One night I rented
The Sound of Music
, which neither of them had ever seen. It seemed incredible to me that Ben could be fifty-nine years old and never have watched this classic movie. He spent the entire time trying hard not to mock it. A couple of times he said, “This is so cheesy . . . .” then caught the expression on my face. He and Yeats exchanged about a thousand looks while I was happily reliving my childhood, when my family used to watch it every year on TV.

Despite these Friday movie nights, it was a struggle for us to spend time together as a family. We had dinner with all the boys, and Danielle if she was around, whenever we could, usually once or twice a month on a Sunday night. Ben would make a big pot of vegetable soup or cauliflower curry and we’d have leftovers the next day, although usually it would be just me eating the leftovers. Ben would be out selling books somewhere around town.

Grade
10
seemed to be suiting Yeats better. I felt that between Mr. Dewees and all the time Yeats spent in the art room, he was finding some kind of balance. His perennial dislike of the system was being tempered by a respect for individual teachers. But I knew that Yeats missed seeing Danielle and her friends every day at school. He consoled himself by walking home and listening to music in his bedroom.

WINTER IN TORONTO WAS
a good time to see ducks. We chose a sunny Saturday in January and took the ferry over to Ward’s Island, which is the easternmost part of Centre Island. This is the largest island in the chain that forms the Toronto Islands and helps to create the city’s harbour. The boat carved a path through the loose ice and when I stood on the rear deck, I watched the ice close up behind us. The farther away we were from the city, the more it looked like we wouldn’t be able to get back. The path was gone.

On the north side of the island we saw buffleheads and
long-tailed ducks
swimming in the harbour. We saw the ubiquitous black-capped chickadee on small trees near the ferry dock, but we didn’t linger long. We crossed over, past a few island homes, towards the south side. There was no one about. Yeats had never been to this part of the Toronto Islands and was immediately charmed.

“People live here? In these little houses?” he said.

The houses were small and rustic-looking. They had wind-chimes and bird feeders and looked like my idea of West Coast hippie life, an idyll from my youth when I hung out in Kitsilano and went to that music festival every summer. But I worried the comparison was simplistic and silly, and didn’t share it with Yeats.

He said, “Are there kids living here? Where do they go to school?”

“There’s that island school, at the west side. The one your class went to when you were in Grade
5
.”

Children living on the island go to the Island Public/Natural Science School, which was first established as a school in
1
888
. Children who live in the lakeside condos on the mainland join island dwellers every day for school, taking the ferry to and fro. And Yeats’s class had joined them, too, for three days when he was ten. “Remember?” I asked him.

“Oh, yeah. It must be at the other end of the island. Maybe we’ll get there today.”

Before we knew it we were on the south side of the island, walking down to a sandy beach. The beach was covered with shattered ice shifting around in small waves. The sound was like a million ice shards tinkling in a huge glass bowl. I could have listened to it all day, but Yeats spotted something through his binoculars and wanted to see what it was.

A boardwalk runs along the south shore of Ward’s Island, and from there we ended up seeing many species of duck. Most of them were out on the water, not close to shore. They were in large flocks, riding the freezing waves of Lake Ontario. We saw
white-winged scoters
, buffleheads, long-tailed ducks, female
common mergansers
, female red-breasted mergansers, common goldeneyes,
redheads
. When we moved in closer to shore we saw
mallards
and
gadwalls
.

It was cold in the wind but I was wearing a lot of clothes. I made a list of the layers in my head as I tried not to freeze: wool socks, boots, long underwear top and bottom, jeans, turtleneck, fleece, long down jacket referred to by my family as the “sleeping bag coat,” hat, gloves, scarf. Yeats was wearing only sweatpants and his hoodie over a T-shirt, and running shoes on his feet. He put his arms through the sleeves of his down jacket but wouldn’t zip it up until partway through the day when he finally started to feel the cold.

I said, “Why don’t you do up your jacket? Where are your gloves? Do you want a hat?” I had an extra, inoffensive, hat in my backpack.

“I’m fine, Mom,” he said, scowling a bit. The scowl was a warning not to push, which made me push just a little.

“But it’s so cold. Aren’t you freezing?”

“No. If I get cold I’ll do up my jacket.”

He turned his back on me and scanned the water for more ducks. He scanned the sky for geese. I took the hint and shut up. I made a conscious effort to lose my maternal irritation. Does a mother ever stop wanting her children to do things her way? Unlikely. But all we can do is hope that something has rubbed off over the years.

Mostly we walked without speaking, only piping up when one of us spotted something. It was our companionable silence, what I came to expect on these birding trips. Sometimes, in social situations, I found myself doing the same thing — watching rather than participating — and I wondered if it made some people uncomfortable. Probably it made them think I was a numbskull, with nothing to say. Oh, well.

We left the open lake and walked north along a road and past the Island School.

“See, this is it,” I said. “You’ve even been here.”

“I didn’t know it was a regular school, too. I thought it was only a science school.” He looked around. “It looks different at this time of year. We played a big game of Predator and Prey in a wood. I saw my first owl then. It was a great horned. I don’t know where we were.”

We looked for the spot but couldn’t find it. We considered going down a road marked with a sign that said
NO TRESPASSING
, but decided not to. We walked a bit farther, east now, and saw a lot of wintering passerines: chickadees, cardinals, white-breasted nuthatches, house sparrows. It was sheltered there, so we sat on a bench and had a snack. A crow flew over, then another.

We walked again and eventually came to Centreville, the summer amusement park on Centre Island. It was closed and deserted except for some animals in a farm across a small canal: a couple of donkeys, some sheep, and two large birds half-obscured by fencing. Yeats frowned and we walked down a pier that jutted into the canal.

“What are they?” I whispered. “Some kind of goose?”

“I don’t know. They’re a weird shape. It’s hard to tell because of the fence.”

“Maybe they’re an accidental.”

“Maybe.” I heard both doubt and anticipation in this one word. Seeing an accidental is extremely exciting for a birder. You feel like climbing a rooftop and shouting it out, but first you have to be very sure.

A huge flock of mallards was swimming under a small bridge in the farm’s canal. Their quacking was distracting me and I looked among them for other species.

Yeats started to laugh. He lowered his binoculars and said, “Look through your binoculars, Mom,” but I didn’t need to because one of the mystery birds had hopped onto the fence and I could see clearly that it was a
peacock
. I laughed too and caught Yeats’s eye. His face was filled with glee at being caught out like that, the joke of it.

As we watched the peacock, a
Cooper’s hawk
swooped in on the mallards, trying to grab one. The ducks made an enormous racket and then fell dead silent as they huddled together, squished like sardines under the bridge. The hawk tried again. We couldn’t believe our luck to witness a hunt. We stood as still as statues, barely breathing. The hawk failed again on its third attempt, and we watched as it flew over the island and out over the inner harbour.