Psychopomp

Today was a cold and dreary day. I sat at the computer and thought, more than I wanted to.

The word 'psychopomp' came up for me today. Last summer John and I took a picnic lunch to Harkness park. Harkness was once the summer estate of a rich and gay family. It included well-cared for gardens and a small golf course, right on the ocean in southeastern Connecticut. One of my high school classmates, who did some summer landscaping work there, wrote a book about the place, called 'The Great Sunflower'. He had a lot of potential as a writer, but he was one of the first young men to become a victim of AIDS (rest in peace, Cliff).

But I digress. Harkness being today a beautiful and relatively peaceful state park, with (theoretically at least) no swimming allowed, it's a good place to go if what you like to do is meditate, watch terns and cormorants dive, and collect tiny shells on the beach; then go visit the gardens, the broken statues; ooooh and aaaah at how the rich lived, or feel the cold wind of life and hopes past. All it lacks is the family graveyard.

John and I just wanted a tree to lean against, to eat our food. So we found a thicket bordered by a tree we could lean on if we needed protection or advice, laid out our blanket, and started doing the picnic part of our excursion.

Soon we were on our backs, admiring the lovely sky and the skilled kite flyers that the breezy park with wide open spaces brings out.

Suddenly a catbird came over and sat on the blanket by my leg. He clearly wanted food, and I was willing to give it, but he was jumpy and would run away if anything spooked him. I finally set a few bits of my lunch far from the blanket so he could feel safe approaching it, then lay back down, using a bag we brought food in for a pillow.

Only a few minutes passed before he came back. He had entered the thicket behind my head, and the next thing I knew, he was in the bag I was using for a pillow! He startled me and I moved; then he freaked, flew out of the bag and landed on John's toe. Clearly he was trying to tell us something and we weren't hearing it. Maybe that was for the best.

In some British Isles myths, sparrow is psychopomp, and not a beneficent one...but I detected neither benificence nor malevolence in our catbird visitor. We have many of that species in our yard now, though, and I do pay attention.