When you own a store and you sit in it all day, it can feel like waiting for guests who didn’t know they were invited. It just feels like waiting. Of course so do most jobs, even jobs that are enjoyable or valuable. You’re waiting for your next break, or for your lunch, or for your shift to be over. We spend a lot of our lives waiting. Waiting’s not so bad, most of the time. It carries a sense of anticipation, and anticipation carries a sense of hope.
And this summer we discovered the best kind of waiting yet. We hung hummingbird feeders in our backyard, and every morning we would sit and wait for the birds to show up. We’d just sit and watch the plants grow and the garden turn greener and greener and we’d wait for the tomatoes to ripen and we’d wait for the hummingbirds to arrive. And they did. Every single day. Almost to a schedule. A hummingbird is a ridiculous thing. Too sweet, too pretty, too rare. Something nobody can really draw or paint without preciousness, and probably something nobody should try to write about. Seeing one feels like a gift or a blessing, to use an overused but completely apt word. And that’s just when they hover for a moment in your garden. When they land on a tree or a stake in your yard, when you start to recognize one from another, when they take on distinct personalities, when they hover close to your face as if they’re trying to tell you something, when they stay for a while in the glowing green twilight light of your perfect summer garden while you sit and breathe the dusty smoky air and drink the hummingbird-green chartreuse you got for your summer birthday. Well, that’s worth waiting for. That could bring tears to the eyes of a person less steely than myself. Of course the thing about a hummingbird is that she doesn’t announce herself. She’s not preceded by a fanfare, she makes no noise. You have to chance upon her, or you have to be watching. You have to wait with focus. And while you’re waiting, every faintly or fastly fluttering thing will attract your attention, and you’ll realize that they’re all pretty, too. The bugs and bees and bigger blundering birds, the twisting falling leaves. And no matter how focussed and expectant you were, the hummingbird will always be a heart-bothering surprise, turning up out of nowhere. And even if she’s exactly where you were directing your focussed gaze, the space will feel buzzing new and strange, like a slice of another world.
Somewhere in the midst of all of this waiting and watching, I started wondering about the French word for wait, attender, and I became curious about the connection between waiting and attending. So I searched it up, as the boys would say, and here is my scholarly report. From various old languages, Old French, Old English, Old Latin, we have “To direct one’s mind or energies, to expect, wait for, pay attention.” “To stretch to or stretch towards” “To heed, take care of, protect.” I love them all! To stretch yourself towards the the thing you are hoping for and waiting for! I love that! And I love the sense of expecting, too, it’s one step beyond hoping. And I love the sense of protecting and caring for, which I suppose is from the “waiting-upon-someone” sense of the word; dancing attendance, as the Williams Shakespeare and Yeats might phrase it. But mostly I love the heeding and the directing of energies and the paying attention. I love the idea that we’re not just killing time, waiting, we’re heedful, we’re attentive. We should wait for everything the way we wait for hummingbirds, keenly, and we should notice everything else that happens while we’re waiting with the same keen attention. We should stretch ourselves towards the thing we anticipate and expect, and we should notice every beautiful thing that flies by us as we’re waiting. And then we should stop writing about hummingbirds, because nobody should try to write about hummingbirds.
On a side note: I had a recipe to go with this, but honestly, I haven’t had time to write it all down, it’s not a recipe I feel happy about, and I’m tired of pretending this is a food blog, which it hasn’t been for several years. I’m not saying there will be no more recipes, but there won’t always be recipes.
There will always be songs though! Here’s Bob Marley and the Wailers with I’m Still Waiting.
“I’m not worried!”
Last Saturday was a blizzarding day. The sky was white and bewildering, the time passed quickly and not-at-all, and the snow lay in deep, perfect drifts all around. A week later, the snow is still in giant gravelly piles where it was pushed away from all the places people walk and drive and park. The time is still passing strangely. The hours pass in the usual way, some flying some crawling, but at the end of the day it’s all a blur and I haven’t done half the things I’ve persuaded myself that I need to do. It’s days like this that make you want to turn into Malcolm’s latest superhero creation: Slothman. Slothman’s super power is that he goes slowly, he takes time to enjoy things. And he enjoys everything. Malcolm believes that people, and himself in particular, move too fast. He is a speedy fellow. So if he could turn into slothman he would slow down, everything would slow down. He could be happy just sitting up in a tree doing nothing but just sitting up in a tree. That in itself would become something to enjoy. The funny thing is that I think Malcolm already has this quality in spades. Not the slowness part, he is fairly full-speed-ahead in all endeavors. But the enjoying part. When you’re doing something with Malcolm–cooking or playing cards or going for a walk–he’ll announce, “This is fun.” And because he says it, you stop and think, “this is fun,” and then, strangely, it becomes more fun, just because he said it. And on the day that Malcolm told me about Slothman, we were on a walk. He’d been jumping puddles rimmed with black mud, and I was worried about his shoes, because it’s my job to worry about his shoes. Malcolm stopped walking and I yelled, “No jumping puddles!” But guess what–he wasn’t jumping puddles, he wasn’t moving at all. He was standing perfectly still, with a beaming face, and he said, “It’s so pretty! The light through the trees! And the shadows!” I looked ahead on the path and it was pretty, it was beautiful. The pale hopeful January light through brambled leafless trees. I thought about taking a picture, but it would never work, I couldn’t capture it. So we just stood for a moment and watched the shifting slanting light, until Clio woke us and we moved on.
