The Color Yellow

We've all met people who erroneously believe themselves to be special, right? I have an old friend who's an avis more rara: He's an unusual person who believes himself to be ordinary. Smart, funny, sure, but basically a regular guy from one of the large lower-middle- class sections of Philadelphia that are called "neighborhoods." Big football fan, all that. But his stepchildren laugh at him when he suggests he's a regular guy, knowing as they do that real regular guys rarely work as consultants for historical archives or take a year off mid-career to go trekking around the world, hiking in Nepal, visiting ashrams, all that.

But this guy just doubles down and works it harder. We were talking once about the relative manliness of various avocations and he looked at me dismissively and said that my birdwatching "speaks for itself." I don't actually watch birds much—I just know the couple of dozen you see around most of the time, and try to observe enough about the unfamiliar ones to identify them when I get home.

I actually think knowing the commonest birds in your area and taking a good look at the ones you don't know so you can look them up later is a good thing that enriches your life a bit for, like, no money. This morning I was idly perusing the various offerings on the Intertubes, wishing there were something more compelling to look at, and suddenly there was: a goldfinch flitting about the neighbor's yard.

The goldfinch is like a trumpet-blast of blazing yellow, a burning dot of color like a miniature sun, and in their dipping, scalloped flight they're like backyard meteors. So I just watched the goldfinch, perfectly happy and entertained, the Web forgotten for the moment. And after it burned away out of sight, I thought of the passage in Alice Walker's The Color Purple where the character Shug says, "I think it pisses God off when you walk by the color purple in a field and don't notice it."

I was driving through the country years ago with a woman who was soon going to be a girlfriend, and we saw some goldfinches flitting along. She idly remarked that there must be a God, for there to be goldfinches. I knew what she meant: Their color seemed like an extravagantly generous gift the only purpose of which was to please the recipient. And who is the gift from? That would seem to speak for itself.

At any rate, I actually do notice the irises in the gardens and the phlox in the forests. And I do notice the goldfinches. If there is a Supreme Being, I hope it wants us to notice colors, that this is a kind of eleventh commandment. It would be one of the few I actually keep, and like all of us, I need all the help and good will that I can get from whatever gods there may be.

(P.S. While we're giving thanks to vast overarching entities, I'd like to thank the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service for the public-domain image. Most appreciated.)