Life of Birds

When the conversation turned to talent the daughter turned her head away. Talent ran in her family. The grandmother had a knack for soup-making. The mother had a knack for dressmaking. The daughter styled hair and wore her grandmother’s and mother’s old dresses.

The grandmother made menudo once a year. She froze tripe and thawed it overnight in the kitchen sink. When the mother and daughter woke up on menudo morning they would gag and eat everything but the tripe.

“Is there anything you are talented at?” he had asked the daughter.

“I don’t believe in talent, only knacks and hard work,” the daughter said. Take her mother—her mother was a piecesmaker, not a dressmaker. It was not about the whole but the way everything fit together. Soup was really vegetables and broth and seasoning. Dresses were really skirts and cuts and sleeves and buttons and holes and thread. Haircuts were really a million tinies obeying scissors. And the way that soup and dresses and haircuts even came about in the first place was because of impulses.

“We have all these impulses,” the daughter said, “and they can become misguided and relabeled and split into general different directions. It could be as simple as love and work, but this impulse to create leads to songs and words and pictures and soup and dresses and haircuts. But they are not an accident, not a distraction, although they are distracting. They’re another pulse, another thread that emanates from us like a kite-tail or an electrical cord that we plug in to the megastructure of people and time.”

“A lot of things that we do are often mistaken for God’s will,” he said.

“Or nature’s accidents. But you don’t have to eat the tripe. That’s the thing. It's not the whole, so you don’t have to eat the tripe.”