Why Urban Pigeon?

Every day at the bus stop downtown, I watch the pigeons. They are fearless. They don't care that cars and buses are whizzing by inches away from them. They don't care that people are sharing the sidewalk with them. They're busy looking for garbage to eat.

Then they fly to a monument and crap on it.

It's sort of like my life. There's been a lot of traffic and a lot of garbage, and my career as a writer hasn't advanced much past crapping on the monuments of decorum and tradition that is Richmond, Virginia. I came here just to go to a college that would let me get a degree without taking a math or phys ed class, and then the plan was to get out of here. But I keep getting married to people who want to stay here, and when I'm between marriages, I don't have enough money to rent a U-Haul. My life is in New York City but someone else is living it.

I think about that when I see the pigeons at the bus stop, one thing Richmond does share with New York. Pigeons.

What am I doing here?

Actually, I really do like pigeons. They also remind me of my father. As a boy growing up in the 1930s in the tenements of Long Island City, he raised pigeons. A lot of city kids did. They kept the roosts on the roofs of their apartment buildings. You didn't need pet food as the pigeons could find things to eat while they were out flying, and they always came back.

When I was in the 7th grade, we moved to a house in Greenville, North Carolina. It was the first house we ever had to ourselves. In New York, we had lived with relatives, like many Italians do. Everyone in the same house. Then we lived in an apartment in Alexandria, Virginia, and then we moved to this house in North Carolina. There was a kid in the neighborhood who had a pigeon coop and we were so enthralled with it -- I had heard my father's pigeon stories -- we decided to buy a couple of the pigeons and build our own coop.

So for a year or so, I had this project I shared with my dad, the pigeons. I have never had a very close relationship with my father, and this was the last chance. Before long, I'd move to permanent alienation via puberty and then distance, and then evil stepmothers.

Our two pigeons had babies (squabs are very ugly babies; I don't think there is an uglier baby in the animal kingdom), and the babies had babies, and I kept journals of which pigeons were married (they mate for life) and who their children were, and who their children married. We let them out. They flew around the house, sat on the roof, and came back to the coop. We cleaned out the coop. That was an awful job, and what eventually distanced me from the pigeon project. That and puberty.

(By the way, do not, and I repeat, do not, google "squab" for a photo. Apparently squabs are a delicacy, and you will find only photos of cooked squabs, which are more disgusting to look at than live squabs. It will also turn you into a vegetarian immediately. I warned you!)

Towards the end, it was just my dad. I'd see him out in the yard, hands in his pockets, wearing his Eisenhower jacket, watching the pigeons circle the sky around the house. Eventually it was no fun for him either, or no fun to do alone, and he sold our pigeons back to the boy who had gotten us started. The decaying roost was still in the yard when we sold the house.

And that was pretty much it for me and my dad. He died a few years ago, an old guy in his eighties that I no longer knew. His third wife kept us all at a distance, so I hadn't seen him in 20 years. But he wrote me one letter every month of just casual chit chat and put a $50 bill in it. I would write him back not to send cash through the mail, but then it occurred to me it was the only way he could do it without his wife knowing. And sending me money was the only way he could make up for not ever coming to see me, or being there for me.

So I watch the pigeons at the bus stop, and because of my dad, I know they're not well bred pigeons because they don't have thick crusts on top of their beaks, but they're not trashy birds either because they do have rainbow coloring on their necks. I wonder who they're married to and where they live. And I think about my dad, standing out in the yard by himself, hands in his pockets, wearing his Eisenhower jacket, and watching the pigeons we named and raised together, flying around the sky.