The Sound of a Diaper Folding

At the height of the madness there was a regulation size city bus ripping limbs left and right as it blundered toward the hook-up, two freewheeling French girls with flip-flops and several bottles of burgundy, a vatic 14 year old nose-locked to his blackberry and subject to spontaneous chicken-jigs, a silver-bearded Jonah, a hands-laying healer woman, a towering robo-hulk with a good eye for long shots, a storyteller-gunman type, replete with a grey moustache, large regular teeth and narrow eyes, a Chinese tea pusher, a Turkish epicurean, a Colombian poet, a purveyor of fine theorems, and one wild whale of a one-year-old with a penchant for pigscreams. Inexplicably, nothing broke, no one got hurt, and the Gathering ended as inconspicuously as it had begun: a little dust on the chairs, the distant hum of the highway.

Family is a wonderful thing. Among its other virtues, it provides a window into a cross section of humanity that otherwise gets winnowed out by our social and professional biases. When was the last time I talked world history with a jittery teenager? Or discussed domestic policy with a retired LAPD officer? There are perspectives and rhythms that I had totally forgotten about, having fallen into the usual trap of assuming that the bulk of the world was like the one in which I spend my days. Newsflash: it is not.

Of course the average mathematician doesn't have to travel very far from his office to realize that mismatched socks and uncombed hair are far from the usual fare. But whenever I revisit my family, I am amazed at just how narrow my circle really is. If the world were nothing more than the gross aggregate of the life I live every day, the people that form my family would be totally uninventable, so far from the mean as to imply some structured skewing of the data: a character fraud, as it were, carried out by some wily painter of people-scapes and set just so to substantiate my pet theory of Natural Diversity. As it is, it can be a challenge to appreciate that these characters were formed in the same slow crucible of experience as I, and that what look like the wild, improbable touches of a journeyman artist are in fact the natural consequences of experiences totally beyond my ken.

We had a great time. We sang, we danced, we drank, we croqueted one another to the rotten log halfway down the mountain in ever widening circles of sporting malice. Wings were flapped, feather preened, crests shaken and bills stretched. It was the Great Family Roost, 2009, and every zany pin-feathered cockastruz who came got exactly what he was looking for: a scent of the flock, a sense of the family pattern. And then, without warning, it was over. Perhaps the Great Cockastruz flapped his wing, or shook his tail. Whatever it was, they all got the signal, and one by one they packed up and pulled out, leaving nothing behind except a few tracks, a couple of white smudges: the usual aftermarks of zootomical scrutiny.

Today, for the first time in two weeks, we are home alone. As the din ebbs and the dust settles, nature slowly pushes in to fill the spaces: the wind is back to its old tricks of making noise in the pines, I see, and that obnoxious Stellar's Jay has decided to come back and pick away at the herbs again. Zoogle and I saw a 10 point buck down the hill this afternoon, and later we spied a spotted fawn asleep on the sand at the side of the road. As we ate dinner in silence on the back porch tonight, we noted that the sun had remembered its old trick of arranging the day's left over color in bright, clean swathes across the twilight sky. And a gray fox came trotting across the lawn just as the first stars came out, a swiftly moving shadow whose passage mopped up what remained of the malice.