TheBanyanTree: screech owl

[Julie Anna Teague]

A bird of few words is my friend Screech Owl, who visits me most 
nights, sometime between two and four a.m.  I'm almost always awake, 
the only one in my home awake, the only one who has heard him, and so 
ours is a soft and confidential conversation.  He trills for five 
minutes or so, and then he has said his piece.  All day long the pine 
trees and cedars and brushy, wild olives and grassy planes of my yard 
are filled with singing, lilting, cawing, chattering birds.  They 
barely stop for breath, all day long.  My friend Screech Owl is more 
like me.  We talk when we have something important to say, and we like 
our silences.

While we are compatible in many important ways, Partner and I fall 
apart in this area.  As much as I love him, he is a chatty man.  Day to 
day, we mostly work out a balance, but sometimes, and especially on 
long car trips, we clash in a major way.  He likes talk while he is 
driving.  Totally understandable, and yet I am so unable to keep up my 
end of the conversation for more than an hour or so.  Unless I'm 
specifically socializing, or discussing something of substance, I am a 
deeply meditative person--in a car, in a waiting room, on the back 
porch, in the john, on a line. Left to my own thoughts, I am traversing 
the quiet desert space inside me, completely content under the endless 
blue sky that meets the endless sand at an endless horizon.  There are 
silent conversations inside conversations and thoughts within thoughts 
going on in there.  The past, present, and future are all jumbled up in 
the same time-space.  Revelations are unfolding.  Poems are writing 
themselves.

Partner, feeling alone on some boring stretch of highway to Pittsburgh 
or Louisville, points out things I am obviously missing along the road. 
In the absence of anything better, he reads road signs aloud. Suffering 
from a mild case of dyslexia, he often reads them incorrectly.  I am 
driven nearly mad.  "Penny Pitcher Auto Sales" he will pronounce.  
"Mmmm-hmmm," I say, because he requires a response, and so I come 
mentally stomping back from my faraway place, "and anyway it was "Penny 
PINCHER Auto Sales," I say inside my head, bothered in some stupid and 
indescribable way by the incorrect reading of the sign.  It seems 
important that I set the world right again by correcting his misreading 
of this totally insignificant human artifact, but I don't, because I am 
a conscious enough person to know that this would be highly irritating. 
  I just want to not have to deal with it--the sign, correcting the 
sign, his need for me to interact.  I just want to drift back to my 
edgeless desert, my bottomless lake, my mountains that peak somewhere 
above the clouds, and think my thoughts.  A poem or a story line, I am 
sure, has died on the highway next to the Penny Pincher Auto Sales 
billboard.  I'm not sure which of us is more nuts.
It's likely that I am as much fun as a screech owl on long road trips.