2004, New York, New York

By Irving A. Greenfield

After I leave Starbucks, I settle onto the rear seat of a taxi on the corner of Eighth Avenue and Fifty Fourth Street. I’m on my way to meet with my producer to discuss my upcoming play. “Eleventh and fifty-seventh,” I tell the driver.

It’s a short distance away. No more than a 20-minute walk if I felt up to it. But I don’t. My stomach is balled into a knot. I worry about being able to make it back to the ferry and to my car in Staten Island and then not being well enough to drive home from the parking lot. In one’s 70s those concerns quickly pop up, sometimes at the slightest feelings of malaise.

It is part of the insecurity that comes with growing old, though I don’t think of myself as being old. But earlier I made the mistake of swallowing two pills I take every morning - one for my heart and the other to control the itch on my back - with hot tea instead of cold water. The result came quickly. Since it was hot and humid day, my discomfort escalated. forcing me to stop and hail a cab.

The cabby drives one block on Eighth Avenue and turns west on to Fifty-fifth. I expect him to turn on Fifty-Seventh. It is the proverbial six of one and a half a dozen of another. Not important enough to comment on, except that I believe traffic moves faster on Fifty-Seventh Street.

Already, we’ve waited for two red lights before we reach Ninth Avenue. On the third red light we’re at the corner. When the signal is green, we cross the avenue, but instead of continuing the driver pulls over to the curb and stops alongside a Key Food Supermarket.

“I must do something,” the driver says as he shuts the meter. “It will only take a couple of minutes.”

I’m too surprised to respond. Nothing like this has ever happened to me before.

“They are waiting for me,” the driver says and leaves the cab with a brown paper bag in his hand.

I’m alarmed, a result of the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center. For a moment, I have a vision of the supermarket being blown to pieces. But by comparison such an explosion would lack the enormous consequences of the one at the World Trade Center.

Even as I reject the idea that the cabby is a terrorist, I watch the cabby open the brown bag and pour its contents next to the supermarket’s wall. Within a second or two the pigeons arrive. A few land on his shoulders, others on his shoes. He imitates the sounds made by the birds.

When he returns to the cab, he says, “They’re happy now.” As he eases the cab away from the curb, he flicks on the meter.

“Do you do this every day?” I ask.

“Oh yes,” the cabby says. “They are happy to see me and I am happy to see them.”

By this time I realize the cabby speaks with a typical Indian accent, has a large black moustache and a dark complexion.

“I have many bags of food for my friends in other places,” the cabby says.

I smile and tell him my father raised pigeons.

The cabby glances over his shoulder at me.

“He loved those birds,” I say softly, reminding myself of something I’d forgotten, or at least pushed so far down into the depths of my mind that it could erupt into my consciousness only if it were triggered by an extraordinary event, like the one that just happened. And then the images come flashing back.

My father’s friend’s house was in Canarsie, very close to Jamaica Bay. The ride there was on a trolley car. Open on two sides with canvas shades to protect the passengers from rain and snow. In the winter there was no protection from the cold. The trolley raced between the backyards of the houses on either side of the track, stopping where it crossed a street to let passengers on or off. The faster it went the more it yawed.

It was always a Saturday or Sunday trip. Unannounced until the day we were to go. The closer we got to Canarsie, the larger the backyards became and the houses fewer until there were large open fields specked with shacks. Squatters, my father called them. Even the air changed. It was sharper. Salty.

At the end of the line, where the motorman turned the trolley around on a large turntable, they were within a few hundred feet of the bay and the Canarsie Pier, a structure made of wood to which a three-masted ship was tied with thick hawsers. Sometimes my father and I would go aboard. The Sea Scouts used it until it was destroyed by the 1938 hurricane. But most of the time, we’d cut across the fields and go directly to Kogel’s house. A wooden, ramshackle two-story affair whose open windows invited every kind of flying insect. And there were many of them because of the nearby swamps.

Kogel’s pigeon coop was in back of the house. It was very large. That was the first place they went to. I followed his father inside, who immediately began to examine certain birds. He never said what he was looking for or why he was only interested in a particular bird. When he was finished, he went back into the yard and shouted, “Kogel, Sam is here.”

Kogel came out of the house. The birds told me that, he said. He was a tall, rangy man with a lean face and unkempt pepper-and-salt hair. In summer he was bare-chested and very tan. In the winter he wore a heavy flannel shirt and a torn, paint spattered sweater. Summer or winter his pants were always worn and stained with oil and paint.

Kogel scarcely looked at him. He had four sons of his own. All were older than I and wilder, often entering the house or leaving through a window rather than the door.

My father and Kogel immediately set the birds free and waved long bamboo poles to keep them in the air. To me it seemed that they did that for the entire time I was there and maybe they did. They seldom spoke. Their attention was totally focused on the weaving flock of birds and its constantly changing shape, making a myriad of geometric patterns: a kind of lace in the sky.

Not all of their visits to Kogel were the same. Those times when my father and Kogel waited for their racers to return were more important than other times. Both men puffed away on cheap cigars, spoke in low tones and drank homemade red wine and black coffee until the first bird entered the coop and clocked in. Later the arrival times of Kogel’s racers were matched against the arrival times of other birds at the local racing club. Winning the race meant money, and money was very scarce because of the Depression. My father sold diamonds but no one had the money to buy them. We lived in a railroad flat on Chester Street in Brownsville section of Brooklyn. Kogel was a bricklayer and a mason. But no one was building anything. He worked at odd jobs.

One or the other of them would spot the bird before it landed and found its way into the coop. The birds were often sent as far south as Miami or west to St Louis where they’d be released to fly back to Canarsie.

Satisfied that all of their birds returned, they shook hands and my father called me for the trolley ride home, during which I usually slept.

Not only did my father share pigeons with Kogel, he also had his own birds. Four: two Red Checkers, one Tumbler and a Fantail. He flew them every day and taught me to fly them. Though the four never made the wonderful patterns in the sky that Kogel’s birds could make, I enjoyed watching them whirl gracefully around the pole. It was also an adventure just to be on the roof. I looked down and saw the people sitting on the stoops or near an open window to be cool. But on the roof, it was always cool, or so it seemed. During the hot summer nights, my father and I slept on the roof.

Then one day his mother told my father that there was nothing to eat. My family was in the kitchen; my three sisters: Shirley, Roslyn, Gail and myself. My sisters were older by many years.

My father asked, “No bread? No potatoes?”

She shook her head.

“Can’t we borrow -”

“No,” she said.

“No,” he agreed.

My mother took a deep breath and exhaled. “The birds,” she said.

My father said nothing.

“The birds,” she said again. “I could make a thin soup that would last us for a couple of days.”

My father’s light blue eyes went from child to child. Then, he pursed his lips, left the kitchen and went up to the roof.

I followed him.

My father walked slowly up the steps, pushed open the door to the roof and stepped out on to its black surface.

I did not go beyond the doorway. The coop was directly in front of him, near the low brick wall at the back edge of the building.

My father went up to the coop but did not open the door. He stood with his back toward Steven. He was hunched over, as if he were protecting himself from blows too painful to bear. He seemed smaller than he was. His body shook with waves of emotion, of sadness. He sobbed softly.

I can’t do it, he suddenly shouted. I can’t do it. He opened the door to the coop and stepped back. The birds were in the air within moments.

My father used a handkerchief to wipe his eyes and blow his nose. Then he moved a way from the coop and watched his birds until they were specks in the sky.

My father never again owned pigeons, and though we continued to go to Kogel my father no longer took any part in racing the bird.

Years later Kogel died. One by one my sister’s married and left the house. World War II came and went. I finished college, married and went off to the Korean War. By the time I returned both my parents were in their 70s. When it wasn’t raining or snowing, I often found my father sitting on a bench close to the Parkside Avenue entrance to Prospect Park feeding the pigeons. More than once he told me, “They’re happy when I come. I’m sure they know me.”

Could I deny it?

The cabby pulls up to the corner of Eleventh Avenue and Fifty Seventh Street. The tab on the meter is $4.67.

I give him a $10 bill. “For bird food,” I say.

The driver smiles at me. “Yes, food for my friends.”

“Our friends,” I say, correcting him, and leave the cab.

Dr. Irving A. Greenfield is 78 years old and lives in Manhattan with his wife, Anita.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Tuesday, March 20th, 2007 | Email This Post

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