I was driving down Blue Island Ave in a sort of industrial area — trucks backing into factories and warehouses on one side and on the other big lots filled with heaps of mulch and firewood behind high fences, then the railroad, then the river — and stopped waiting for a semi to perform its maneuvers as it backed into a too-small loading dock. On the side of the road, still at that time spotted with heaps of snow: a small, curly dog, gray or dirty like the snow, with a harness but no leash, his paws holding down the splayed wing of a dead pigeon while his teeth ripped into its body, the little dog’s head raised up to tear meat and feathers free. And then traffic was moving again. The radio played “I’m so lonely.” The radio played an ad for a local brewery. The radio played a public service announcement warning people not to open the door for ICE. The radio played a group of teenagers interviewing each other about playing house shows. The radio played Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou on piano. The radio played a news story about bird flu. Finally, the radio played an interview with a renowned pigeon scientist:
Pigeon Scientist: … one of those places you can come across in any city, where someone, usually an older gentleman, has set himself up a chair at the edge of the sidewalk, in this case in a small, fenced-in yard, but you can also see this on a stoop for example, or even leaning out a first-floor window, and he has a bag of birdseed or breadcrumbs (and we really try to warn against the danger of bread for birds) and he scatters it all over the sidewalk, which is shortly swarmed by pigeons. And the pigeons know he does this every day, so they’re there waiting and they start bringing friends. So pretty soon, you’ve got a lot of birds. The sidewalk in that area becomes impassable to human pedestrians.
Interviewer: Wow. Sounds like a real problem.
Pigeon Scientist: It depends on whose point of view — it’s a pretty good deal for the pigeons.
And at that moment, I reached my destination and turned the car radio off. The mid-winter gloom had resolved into a beautiful spring morning. The sky glowed, and sparrows chirped in the bushes, which were still bare-branched but which would soon bud and leaf over to hide the trash piled beneath them. Cans, pizza and Chinese menus, liquor bottles, a moldy mattress, a dollhouse, cigarette butts, plastic bags, a shoe…
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