the songbirds wanted love
You’ve been driving for hours across this valley on a backroad to Los Angeles, black motorcycle gang members weaving between you and the flatbed trucks hauling carny rides to the next show. The elderly woman driving the rig keeping pace with you in the right lane has a white patent leather newsboy cap on, her arm out the window, she’s looking down at you like you’re a seatcover.
Why were you headed to LA? When you were a kid LA was like the moon, you’d seen them both on tv but had no idea how to get to either. But you’d rather be in LA than on the moon. That’s where CHiP’s was. Now here you were, on the outskirts of that fable, and the folks on the highway with you were probably from Croatia, Jalisco, Vancouver, this was the gypsy road in, thoughts in a hundred different languages about the suitcase in the breakdown lane that had burst open and tumbled contents for two hundred yards.
You remember back at the filling station that man standing beside his car with his shirt off. He was about fifty, covered in thick white hair on his chest and arms that was catching the cool desert evening breeze. You wouldn’t normally start a conversation with a guy like that, but he said – Nice night for a drive- and you asked him – Where you headed – and he told you he’d divorced his wife after 22 years and now he was just driving because he didn’t have a home. Don’t worry too much, you can start over, you said, everything has an end. And a hot dog has two he answered.
You didn’t know what to say so you got in your car and drove off, NPR’s signal was strong out in the valley, like it had no where to go, too weak to climb over the foothills, so it just stood a few feet off the desert floor like heat shine off the highway and you plowed through it listening to a woman talk about song birds.
You learned through her study of finches that males are the ones that sing intricately patterned calls while the females answer with a rudimentary yes or no. It’s the same for songbirds all over the world. It must be why LA was full of guys who wanted to rock or rap. They put fancy feathers on and sang as best they could, because the songbirds wanted love.