Storytime with the Wizard 2

The Black-Capped Chickadee and the Elementary School

Note: Storytime with the Wizard of Monadnock is a recurring segment that concludes each episode of our new podcast, Underground Over the Air. In anticipation of our third episode – due out any day! – we wanted to share the transcript from the second storytime segment. Be sure and subscribe to the podcast on any of your favorite apps – and stay tuned for episode 3.

So here I am, yet again, forced to log some more hours of storytelling as part of my Wizard obligations with the State – NOT THAT I MIND, because I really love telling stories and I especially love telling stories to all of you, but I mean…I’m a busy guy and there’s only so much time in the day, even when I refuse to sleep, and I just have like nine other tasks I could be tending to. But here I am complaining – the whining wizard – and nobody wants to listen to that.

--Which is something of a shame, because I have so many things to complain about! I am so very, very disappointed in so many things, and, even worse, so many people. Not any of you, of course (taking a page from Jeanne Dietsch’s playbook), but…people. But nobody wants to hear that sort of thing. Remember this, aspiring storytellers out there – it’s a big lesson I learned through annoying the crap out of most of my friends over the years.

The line, I’ll admit, can be a fine one. For example, when I am aggravated – in that state that’s not straight-up mad but might be described as “pleasantly irritated” or even “happily pissed”, I can be extremely entertaining – borderline hilarious. And that’s in part because the shit that pours out of my mouth, seemingly of its own volition, isn’t what we’d describe as “complaining.” Instead, with no stage and no mic and no audience – well, no voluntary audience, anyway – I unconsciously begin a sort of improv stand-up routine riffing on all the people and things that are bothering me. With foul language and questionable metaphor, I can illustrate – to myself as much as to anyone else – how the situation that’s bothering me is funny, how my position is funny, how even perhaps my behavior and response to the situation is funny. I laugh at myself as much as any of the other stuff, and then everyone else laughs along with me. Because it is funny. You can always choose to laugh at life and laugh at yourself, and sometimes that’s one of the most important things you can do.

Sometimes it’s the only thing that helps.

On the other side, I seem to have been blessed or cursed with an abnormally contagious mood. That works both ways. When I’m filled with mirth and joy, people feel that, and they want to come around. But when I’m down – not pleasantly irritated or happily pissed or merely aggravated, but either ragey or just straight up down, depressed, defeated – the opposite is true. People are repelled away from me. And that’s not how I’m feeling right now, in this moment (I’m actually in a fairly good mood) but it is how I’ve spent the whole week feeling, because sometimes, even when all of this is over, I’m just not sure how I’m ever gonna be able to hang out with most people ever again.

And that’s why we’re not going to talk about that stuff! Instead, I’m going to talk about something I’m not disappointed by: the black-capped chickadee. In fact, I’m extremely impressed and surprised by our fine little feathered friends. No joke. We talk a lot about hawks and vultures (who are fine creatures) and crows and ravens and eagles and owls, which is all fine and good until everyone ignores the black-capped chickadee.

This whole thing started for reasons unknown. I don’t know why I get these impulses sometimes. But after well over three and a half decades, I recently decided it was finally time to figure out just what the hell birds, specifically, were making some of the sounds I hear all the time – sounds I also in many cases heard for my entire childhood playing in the yard and the surrounding forest in Townsend.

(Townsend is not part of the Monadnock Region and it often seems like a completely different world to me, but the truth is that it’s only 30 minutes away and the bird population is – as you might imagine – basically the same as it is here. They don’t understand the cultural differences. And maybe that’s or the best.)

But anyway, this first led me to the mourning dove, which is the source of one of the two main sounds I wanted to identify. *do a mourning dove sound* That’s a terrible impression, but I just love that lazy “what’s up” vibe that they give off. I was quite happy to learn that the creature making these sounds has a name, but when I saw a picture of a mourning dove online, what struck me as the most odd was the fact that I’ve heard this sound a billion times but I’ve never actually seen a creature that looks like this bird.

(Since then, as one might expect, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen them up close at least twice.)

But when some in my cohort tried to pin the second sound (I guess most people call them bird calls, but whatever) on the mourning dove as well, the internet did not support this. *tee-too*. Another sound I feel like I’ve always heard coming lazily out of the same trees as the mourning doves, on the same long sunny hot lazy afternoons of summer. “Come on, guys,” I implored everyone I saw. “What the hell makes that sound? Tee-too! You know what I’m talking about.” Everyone always knew what I was talking about. Nobody knew what the sound was.

This went on for at least a couple of months. And I have to apologize to whoever the hell finally pointed me in the direction of the black-capped chickadee – I think it was Kellie, but if it wasn’t, I am sorry because I got so excited and impressed that I forgot about you – but there was the answer. You know what’s funny? The bird people call it the chickadee’s “fee-bee” call. Feeee-beeeee. I mean I guess but the truth is, I don’t really think it sounds like fee bee at all. The second syllable doesn’t enter my ear as a long “e” sound at all. I hear “tee-too”. But whatever. There’s no accounting for taste.

What’s all the more shocking and impressive is that I’ve been aware of the black-capped chickadee for at least 30 years, having first been taught about this friendly little mini-dinosaur in my first grade classroom in 1990, from my teacher Mrs. Matson. There was a good reason for this lesson, and it wasn’t like she had a particular affinity for tiny birds: the black-capped chickadee, for those of you who don’t know, not only makes that wonderful sound – teee-toooo – but is the official state bird of the great Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Well-deserved, I must say.

It’s a memory that carries a lot with it. I remember that classroom still, remember it so well, although all the important stuff I remember is really hard to put into words. There’s a spirit, a vibe, I associate with it. I can feel it, but I don’t know how much of it I can say – but I’ll try, since I am contractually your storyteller and that is, after all, my job.

Back then, I thought of the 50s and 60s as ancient times, but what kills me today in 2020 is I look back now at my childhood as having themselves been ancient times. We thought ourselves – even at six years old – as living at the pinnacle of modernity, and maybe in some ways we actually were, even if none of us had even heard of this thing called the internet yet. We still had typewriters. Mimeographs.

The classroom was in Squannacook Elementary School, a wonderful building of granite and yellow-painted wood (although in 1990, it might have been light blue – I can’t quite remember). Like all of the wildly divergent school buildings in Townsend, it’s an absolutely delightful building. Maybe not quite as overtly magical as Pine Hill or High Mowing in Wilton, but…still pretty damn magical. We were all lucky to go to school there, because it was a very special place, a warm place, a safe place – and I mean that in the least cheesy way possible.

As if that wasn’t enough, the school was built and opened just for us. A lot of people don’t know this, but the millennial generation – especially its older half – is slightly larger than the baby boomers, and I and my peers were right at the cusp of that first wave. It was in the fall of that very year, 1990, that the school opened – literally, just for us. It had a high-ceilinged library that was literally at the center of the school – right when you walk in the front doors, across the lobby and in between two symmetrical staircases, you face the equally-as-magnificent doors to the library, where I learned about pharaohs, headless horsemen, how to collect stamps, and where the librarian sat in a rocking chair reading us every Tomi DiPaola book ever written. There was a bathroom up on the second floor near the art room where, for some reason, they had put a subtly beautiful window that cast the most spectacular light in the late afternoons. It’s partially surrounded by dense forest with a huge area for recess – a massive paved expanse that led into a sandy playground area, which itself led to the largest section, a very playful grassy field.

The principal, Dr. Anthony Luzetti – if there was a book that described the most perfect, ideal, benevolent small town elementary school principal, it would be describing this guy. I look back and know that he was a kind of saint for us children – specifically for us. I guess maybe he still is; last I checked, he’s still alive. May he live a hundred years. He deserves it.

My teacher was herself the perfect first grade school teacher. I remember she used to let me ramble to her about my ideas on everything from “Night on Bald Mountain” to the flaws inherent to “The Land Before Time.” She read stories and played records, taught us penmanship, and started describing the world to us. And the world was good! The world had problems and challenges, but things were really looking bright, looking up, that things weren’t just going to be all right, they were going to be stellar. That’s really how it was then. That’s really how we thought.

And she taught us, of course, about chickadees.

The school building still stands, but it’s no longer used for classroom space. I believe most recently it’s being used as administrative offices for the school building. I’m not kidding when I say it was built and opened specifically just for us. By the time we were graduating high school, there wasn’t the same number of kids coming up anymore, and they really didn’t need to have that school anymore. A couple years later, they moved the remaining grades elsewhere – probably fifteen years ago now.

Maybe the cycle will come around again. Maybe another generational cohort will get to go through that building like we did. I think about this a lot. I really hope so. But sometimes I am really irrational about these things – even if that happened, could it ever be like 1990? Can any group of children ever come up seeing the world as not merely magical but functional, hopeful, and exciting?

It is not in my contract to have answers to that question.

But I’ll leave you with this – what’s impressive is that not only does the black-capped chickadee make that beautiful sound I love so much, but that sound is only one of SIXTEEN calls they make. There’s the obvious “chick-a-dee-dee-dee” one as well, and then fourteen others. They aren’t remotely random, either. For a tiny little bird, they’ve got super advanced language skills and communicate all kinds of information to one another up in the trees.

And we get to hear it as song.

That’s our show for tonight. We thank you for joining us here in the space lounge and look forward to joining with you again in just a couple more weeks. If that sounds like too long for us to be separated, consider supporting the program and becoming a subscriber in order to access special bonus episodes during the off weeks. Patreon.com/monadnockunderground. Of course, our regular weekly writing is always published on Monadnock Underground dot com and shared on our Facebook page, so check out either and both.

Many blessings and much peace. We’ll see ya later.