My morning hot chocolate

To top off my morning hot chocolate

Here at the office

I open a carton of milk,

One of the small ones--

Tear away the glue

And peel back two

Cardboard flaps along

Ready-made creases.

I pull back the triangles, and there,

Greeting me,

The Milk Carton Smiley Face.

Two eyes to show

Where to press your fingers,

A dotted smile,

Arrowed at the corners

Showing where

To push the triangles back,

To squeeze the smile

Into a fish face, and then

Release back:

A perfect diamond milkspout

Is created;  

Just like new, like every

Milk carton ever.

I remember how Will Schmeeckle

And Anthony Flores

And me in the second grade lunchroom,

Would fold the cartons

Around little red straws

So the carton became

A tank.  And we’d impale

Helpless tater tots,

Dipping their chunky corpses

In ketchup blood.

Back then we never said anything

(Though we saw it every day)

About the Milk Carton Smiley Face.

But twenty years later,

Now, in a place I never

Imagined I’d be

That face appears again

And looks at me.

Prayer for a Parking Lot

The world is full of non-places.

The parking lot outside the window of Room 212 at the Sleep Inn in Omaha, Nebraska is one of them. On an autumn night, wind makes the plexiglass window hum, and so I peel back the shade of the tomb of a room and look.

It’s a parking lot, entirely empty. The few guests here tonight have parked out front. Beyond the blacktop and curb is a bank of trees, a field, an office park, and, at last, a regional airport whose last flight already left.

The parking lot is a space created by man and left alone by man. Out there in the dark, windy, unknown and unnoticed spot, no two human bodies have ever met in passing, never touched, never spoken. Never admired, never even thought of. Maybe, once, a confused deer or a rabbit might have emerged from the little group of trees, suddenly tense at the exposure, wide-eyed at the flatness. But that would be all. This place has no retrievable past and no hope of anything happening here in the future. The last moment in history for this place was the day it was paved.

Even so, Lord Jesus, quickly come, come to the place outside this window, and night shall be no more. For where can I flee from Thy presence? If I run into the windy, abandoned parking lot behind Room 212, Thou art there before me, and after I leave, Thou remainest behind, dwelling in a place Thou lovest and that Thou rememberest in the midst of all the changing universe.

The Bicyclist

Pudgy, you’d call him, or squat, a smallish boulder of a man, but in any case well-balanced. With two bearskin hands bearing down on the handlebars, he whizzes through dew-laden traffic in the early morning suburban outpost of a metropolis. Beneath his bulk, the bicycle looks like it could snap, like the just-too-thin tree branch giving way beneath Pooh on his way out to the honey hive. But up he stays, and then some, cutting off cars, torpedoing down the hash marks while they, the inflexible hulks whose mirrors reach out to clip his elbows, wait at intersection lights.

He’s older than you’d expect, and he wears no underwear, a fact abundantly revealed as he glides past the corner crosswalk, hunched over for speed, pulling the fringe of his pleather Redskins jacket up, and the beltless hem of his light blue Levis down, revealing a wide fleshy band of gargantuan pinkness. We on the corner pretend not to notice the magnificent jest of his enormous presence.

Sea-Tac Burger King Girl

“Can I help the next person!” It’s not spoken as a question. Nargiza (so says the gold bar name badge pinned to her black polo) calls me to the newly opened register. She, the manager, is hopping on to open the relief valve on a line building up behind me.

“I’ll take a number one,” I say, “with no mustard or mayonnaise.”

The number one comes with no mustard—only mayonnaise and ketchup. Did I want just the ketchup then? Yes. With cheese on that? Yes, with cheese.

“Nargiza. Is that how you say it?”

It is.

“What a beautiful name.”

“Order number five,” says Nargiza and hands me my receipt. For a moment, half a moment, she smiled. “Next in line please!”

I step back into the school of circling passengers, waiting with one hand resting on the raised handles of our roll-away suitcases and the other cradling our smart phones. Reflexively, I reach toward my pocket, to sate the ever-present hunger for a morsel, just a morsel, of email. That’s when I see her.

Over the counter, beyond Nargiza’s round, sloping shoulder, through the cut-away window linking the broiler room to the registers, I see her. She’s sixteen, maybe seventeen or eighteen with a young face, her features delicate, long, dark hair pulled off of her neck by the strap of an oversized visor that matches the polo shirts. She’s wearing crystal studs in her ears and, visible when she smiles to herself, braces on her teeth. Both her lips and earlobes are like her visor, a little too big for her head, a little bird-like and cartoonish as a result, and all the more lovely for it.

She’s absorbed in her work, which I watch, a theme with variations. First she looks up at a screen of some kind, invisible to me, hanging slightly above her (she is quite short). Her eyes move to precisely that point on the hidden surface where they will glean the information they need. Then her chin and attention tilt down to the stainless steel counter, she reaches to her right, presses her fingers onto the corner of a square of wrapping paper upon which an open-faced burger lays prostrate for its adornment, and slides paper and burger in front of the hard plastic tubs nestled in front of her. Her hands, wrapped in oversized plastic gloves, move quickly to the pale tomato slices, the ridged pickle chips floating in saline juice, a pinchful of diced onions and a handful of shredded lettuce—then out come the flat-edged blades to slab ketchup, mustard (not mine), and mayonnaise (definitely not mine) on the naked half of the bun, which she then flips on top of the veggie-and-patty pile—immediately, her hands move outward to the corners of the waxy paper, which she folds into triangles and brings in to the center above the burger, tucking in the edges with her spare fingers all the while. She turns the package, lifts it; her right hand produces a black artist’s pencil and marks something on the paper. Finis. At last she turns outward, through the window, toward me, drops the burger down the sloped aluminum chute, where it rests for a moment, before Nargiza picks it up, puts it in a brown paper bag already steaming with fries, folds down the top of the bag and says:

“Order number two!”

It’s horrible, of course, what lies behind that burger. You think of the cows. There are many, many sharp machines between a calf in her momma’s belly and the burger in that bag. You think of the kids in college who became vegetarians over that.

I think they became vegetarians because they hungered for the real, for Reality, more than a comfortable hamburger. Wake up! This is really happening, and you’re a part of it! That’s what their choices said. It’s pretty unimpeachable, that witness to, not just violence, but hidden violence. Shine the light on reality. How does a burger really get to you in the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport?

And yet, and yet, and yet…Reality is like a germ, or a bamboo plant, that you can’t snuff out, can’t quite root out of the system, no matter where along the production line you find yourself, because part of how a burger gets to you in the lonely, invigorating amoeba of strangers in the airport food court is through that girl.

Three bags later, Nargiza calls my number. She almost smiles at me again, and then I’m gone, she’s gone, the girl in the window is gone, just like all beautiful things eventually.

Cutting My Lawn In A Hurricane

You waited two weeks, say the neighbors to themselves, two whole weeks to let this veritable prairie grow in your yard, and now you pick now? Now? Now that it’s about to hurricane, you decide to cut the grass?

It’s true. Dark all morning, the first spit of the storm is just now carrying in on the wind. It is time for action.

Progress is a steady, unflinching process in the front yard, one damp row after another. Wet grass clumps to the blade and mattes the head of the mower, but I plow straight through. Behind me, the finished patches look like a wide-eyed young marine after his turn with the razor.

My back yard, though, is deep, dark even on a sunny day with all the tree cover, and the lawn is a woodsy salad of blue grass, clover, and broad-leafed vines hung over the wooden fence and carpeting the ground with generous leftover portions. By the time I reach it, the rain is picking up; the drops are fatter and colder. Looking up against a framed patch of polished silver sky, the drops look like shards of ice, tossed around in the wind.

Back on the green, green ground, the blade catches on a particularly wet and tangly patch. The engine coughs, loses its breath for a moment, then kicks back in. The wind whooshes. The blade catches a second time and its heart stops beating, just for a moment, before the engine-spirit takes pity, turns away from the light and decides to remain with me for a little while longer down here in the storm. A third time and it just dies.

There’s still a triangle left though, the thickest part of the whole yard, and although that vegetative cholesterol killed the engine once, I’m determined to see it devoured before the fierce part of the storm arrives. I scamper to get the gas can, pour unsteady elixir into the open, empty mouth of the engine while trying to shield the water from getting in as well, screw the cap back on with wet, grassy, gassy fingers, and pull the chord. Life!

Life, life, life. I finish the job, remembering this storm is called Irene, which is Greek for peace.

Feathers

From the train window, the wet blacktop behind the warehouses of these Connecticut towns slithers by. Banks of dark green foliage on the other hand—dark because it is August and also eight o’clock—they whoosh by, like wings.

My taxi driver this morning, who took me from mass at St. Mary’s Catholic Church to the wedding at Holy Transfiguration Orthodox Church, was named Steve. He used to be a sausage salesman, which he liked for the same reason he liked the taxi business: he took care of people. Losing that sausage job, he said, was harder than his divorce.

And there were friends, friends I saw this weekend, though not as many as there used to be. Ray and Sherri, who took me in, even as they were packing to move to Florida. And Phyllis, Phyllis my Oracle, eighty-seven years old and tucked away in a houseful of antiques on Edgewood Street; Phyllis, who asked me in all earnestness what it was like to break someone’s heart.

There was a toast at the wedding reception this afternoon, (held on cotton table cloths and paper napkins in the church hall) a toast given by a friend of the bride, a searching-eyed, long-haired young man who quoted from Emily Dickinson. “Hope is the thing with feathers.” He and the bride used to memorize poetry together, and she used to love him, but he never did. Then he sat down.

Before the train got to this great iron bridge, the color of cities in Connecticut, the color of rust, we passed by a lake, filled in among reeds and cattails. Two swans were swimming across the surface of the black water, cutting V’s into the gloss.

Bump

To escape the heat for just a moment, a man, dressed in a full suit, probably a lawyer, stepped out of the cattle herd flowing toward the turnstiles out of the McPherson Square metro station, and walked over to one of the giant circular fans whirring within its metal cage, trying to circulate air in the station. He stopped right in front of it, put down his briefcase, and tilted his head back. The fan blew across his neck, over his tilted cheeks and lifted the hair falling back from his forehead.

I watched him do this, and saw a pleased, satisfied smile settle into his face. For just one moment, he was breaking a pattern and mining a moment of delight out of a vein of possibility that most workmanlike prospectors did not even see. He knew it: this moment was there and he had found it.

Thud! I walked right into the retractable barrier that admits and releases passengers through the turnstile. Bouncing back a step, I reflexively swiped my metro pass over the sensor again, and the barrier opened before me. I laughed. Something about slips and falls and bumps strikes us as hilarious; no doubt there’s a theory of comedy to explain this. My own theory is that collisions and delight are both at the foundation of the material world: we imagine that atoms are things zipping around like inexhaustible billiard balls on an infinite table, colliding and crashing off in a new deflected direction every millisecond because that is just what makes sense to our notion of delight, even joy you might say, down at the deepest heart of things.

Ascension

There’s a book out there that I haven’t read yet, but I mean to, called The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The title is so wonderful that I like to imagine that I already know the gist.

Sometimes, a person can feel so at peace, that they sheerly whisp through the rooms and hours of a day. All is well, all will be well, no matter what comes—even if sadness comes. Lightness permeates all. Have you ever felt that way? There is a twinkle to your very existence. I like to imagine Jesus, forty days after being resurrected, having walked and loved and eaten with so much pure twinkle in his soul and in his body during those several weeks, that at a certain point he just hardly couldn’t help it: He lifted. Up! Lightness into lightness.

But why unbearable? Well, have you ever been light like that, and then remembered how much you love a processed cheeseburger and cherry coke late on a Friday night with friends who are a little drunk and thinking of nothing but the delights of filling their fleshyness with calories and movies and maybe even—well, probably, even—making out with a beautiful person? The lightness is higher, it is a more perfect pleasure; it is why Aristotle fell asleep with a bronze ball in his hand, so that at the moment he fell into too deep and delicious a REM it would slip from his fingers and clash to the ground that he needed to escape, jarring him awake to return to the pursuit of contemplation. The lightness is higher.

But, o!, the ground! Rich soil, indeed. We are beasts with bodies, too. It’s helpful to remember at these times that even as Jesus lept and lifted (and laughed—how could he not laugh at the sheer delight of it?) he left his Spirit behind.

The Revolution

There are four seasons in Washington, D.C., but only one where the city is itself. No one ever wrote a song called “Autumn in D.C.” Nor should they. Fall is the season when D.C. gets disowned by incumbents back home with their constituents and savaged by challengers whose only professed desire to go to Washington is to completely change it. Now think about winter in the Capital—and what comes to mind? If you’re a yuppie, maybe a scene or two from Aaron Sorkin. If you watch the nightly news, maybe you sort of recall a fleeting feel-good shot of the White House Christmas tree lighting. The other 97% of the population? Nothing. What is there? Frozen breath, a dead brown and gray landscape, a couple wet and heavy snows. That’s about it.

Then comes spring. Spring in D.C. is like your job: it’s fine. Just fine. Better than not having it, right? Way better, in fact. And there are cherry blossoms! For two weeks, tens of thousands of people crowd the edge of the Tidal Basin with one goal, the goal of framing a picture of their kids or their girlfriends under a cherry blossom tree so that it looks like no one else was there. Then the blossoms shed and it’s over. Like I said, better than not having it, right?

D.C., though, was made for one season, and one season only. The founding fathers planted our capitol in the thick of a swamp because they had an idea about what would come with the heat.

People blame the fathers for this move, chalking up the Capital’s location to some boneheaded failure of imagination brought on by a cold snap during winter planning meetings in Philadelphia. Not me. I think they saw what would come of it. I think they saw the surprise of feeling yourself perspire under a wool suit and linen shirt at 7:30 a.m. They smelled the city summer air, before there was even a city, the thick, sweet, pungent smell of bus fumes and humidity. They saw fro-yo shops in Metro Center and on K Street, and the face-flushing dashes that besuited men and women would make across baking afternoon pavement to get there. The fathers imagined the legions—legions!—of interns descending upon the district like good-natured locusts, rising in the sky like clockwork in mid-May and disappearing again with the wind in mid-August, mighty swarms of 18 year olds and 23 year olds, cramming themselves into offices and agencies and think tanks and leadership institutes, devouring every last morsel of the subletting market. I’m sure, too, that even from Constitution Hall, the framers could imagine the tags. Everyone would wear a tag. Holstered on a belt clip, hanging around a neck lanyard, pinned to a neon tour group t-shirt—names, mug shots, magnetic charges, access, status, authority, proof of belonging. And in addition to all that, the framers saw the joggers in spandex and earbuds, darting across crosswalks, they saw the young women in sleeveless camisoles and pearl necklaces wrapped around their young, open-collared men on the metro platforms, the happy hour drones buzzing out on the patios, and people everywhere, man woman and child, adopting the universal default posture: head bent down at forty-five degrees, staring at a small bluish screen in their palm. In short, nineteen score and seven years ago, our fathers saw summer in this District and called it good.

The other night, I stepped out into an evening that bore the first hint of early summer. The veil of humidity was there, but warmth had not yet become heat. There was a forecast of rain.

In McPherson Square, the grass had been cut for the first time all year that morning, and now it was standing plush and fragrant. Homeless men and lawyers peopled some of the benches. Tourist families on their way back from the Mall to their hotels skirted around the giant bronze equestrian statue mounted upon a granite pedestal in the middle of the square. General James McPherson surveyed his namesake patch of territory with the same commanding resolve that no doubt inspired his brethren in the Kentucky Army to donate his likeness to the city back in the distant past, a time so distant that people must have remembered who General McPherson was.

The birds were out in full force, as usual. Pairs of mallards waddled through the grass together, while broods of pigeons flocked near any bench whose occupant bore a sandwich. Higher up, a small group of seagulls blown in from the Eastern Shore hovered. One of them alighted on the highest and sturdiest point in the park, which happened to be the peak of General McPherson’s hat. Together, the three of them, the horse, the bird, and General McPherson, gazed solemnly into the evening.

It reminded me of Hamlet, the graveyard scene, when Horatio tries to console the prince out of his macabre, melancholy musing about what must have become of the bodies of Caesar and Alexander, how flesh became corpse, became dirt, became loam, became a plug for a beer barrel, stowed away in a storeroom somewhere in Denmark. As for General McPherson’s flesh, who could say, but we saw what became of his likeness, his memory on the earth: General McPherson is now a place for gulls to perch in summer.

Overheard

"I don't know what I'm sincere about anymore."

"How can you not know that?"

"I don't know...I just don't."

A pause, a beat. Two beats.

"You should pick something and just be sincere about it."

"That's not what sincerity is supposed to be."

"Why not?"

"Sincerity--you're supposed to feel it. It's supposed to just...bubble up from inside of you. You're supposed to know it."

"Well, can you do that?"

"No." Defiance.

"So, start with what you can do. Just pick something."

Status

Last night I updated my facebook status to say “Tenebrae.” Three minutes later, a friend of my mom’s commented: “Could you please define the word for me? We are attending such a service but don't know what the word means.” This is my answer:

Tenebrae is about fear.

At 6:30 yesterday evening, I opened a new tab in Google Chrome and clicked on the picture of my inbox. Gmail popped open—all 5,000 unarchived messages worth. I put one word for the search box: “tenebrae.” Five thousand became one, a forward from my friend: “You should join us for Tenebrae at the Dominican House of Studies on Wednesday!” I got the address and double checked the time. I had just under an hour to get there.

In the elevator, I saw Fiona. “Heading home?” I asked. “To the gym first,” she said. “How about you?”

“I’m going to a church service,” I said, “called Tenebrae—it’s a traditional Dominican service for the night before Holy Thursday,” I added, seeing her eyebrows lift.

“Are you Dominican?” she asked. It took me a moment, then I understood the subtext. Fiona has very dark skin; I am every bit as pale as she is pigmented. Plus, my name is Christian Huebner.

“Oh, I mean the order of Catholic monks,” I said.

***

I asked the security guard on the campus of Catholic University where the House of Studies was, but I probably didn’t need to. There were enough students, Hill, and K Street types in blazers and sun dresses winding their way through campus to follow the trail.

The brothers and friars were prepared to meet us inside. Most of them were young, in their twenties and early thirties, all wearing the familiar white cassocks with long wooden Rosaries tied around their waist as a cincture. For this evening, they’d also donned their black outer cloaks. I asked where the bathroom was, and a brother pointed me through some double doors and down a hallway. It was a one staller, so I had to wait my turn. When the first guy came out, I saw that he had curly hair and was wearing a corduroy sport jacket and tie. What is it with the conservo-Catholic uniform?, I thought as we nodded at each other. On the way out of the bathroom, I adjusted the collar of my new Jos. A Bank dress shirt and straightened my khaki blazer.

The chapel was packed; I spotted a row with some empty seats—and, by sheer coincidence, some rather pretty young women who all shook their heads at me to say that those places were being saved. I looked around and spotted a cluster of my friends waving to me on the other side of the aisle.

We settled in, and Tenebrae began.

As far as what you do at Tenebrae, that’s pretty straightforward. It’s not a mass—you’re sitting most of the time, in my case in a hard wooden chair brought into the vestibule for overflow behind the screen. We opened with a hymn, “Ah, Holy Jesus,” which is nothing if not lovely and melancholy. For me, kind Jesus, was thine Incarnation / Thy mortal sorrow, and thy life’s oblation / Thy death of anguish and thy bitter Passion, for my salvation. Most of the service then was Psalm singing, antiphonally, about the sufferings of Christ. Spent and utterly crushed, I cry aloud in anguish of heart . . . My wanton enemies are numberless, and my lying foes are many ... That sort of thing. Again, really quite beautiful. The Domincans interspersed this with readings from Scripture and from St. Augustine, and with short motets from a small choir. The reading was sound in diction; the choir was mostly solid and tuned, if a little wobbly on the polyphonic passages. After each segment of the service passed—a psalm, a reading, a song—one of the brothers would extinguish one of the fifteen candles lit at the front of the chapel, starting with the outside and working in, back and forth, like a scythe, until only the single, central candle remained.

My mind wandered during most of this. What a pretty chapel this was—-shape the words as I sing them—-would I want to be a Dominican? probably not-—maybe some other kind of priest?—-bow during the Glory Be—-wow, she’s beautiful—-don’t I recognize that brother? I do! It’s George!—-wow, yep, really beautiful—-I’ll have to try to catch him afterward—-think about the words, think about the words . . .

At the end of the service, the lights went out. Night had stolen upon us, and only the one candle remained, the Christ candle. Then brothers escorted it out, too, through a side door, which they left open. From beyond the door, a light glowed into the darkened chapel, and the brothers started singing, Christus factus est pro nobis obediens usque ad mortem—Christ became for us obedient even unto death—and when the music ended a friar who had remained in the chapel exhorted us to pray. I don’t remember the words, but I got the gist: Lord, forgive us for crucifying your Son. The prayer ended. There were no lights. Silence.

Then a terrible, horrifying crash! Something was happening! No one could see, and noise—a screeching, piercing racket—sheer noise filled the chapel. Someone, some group of someones, was battering sheets of metal or pipes or lighting firecrackers with reckless ferocity, and it was dark and no one could see what was going on.

It stopped after a minute. Even before then, my mind caught up to what was happening: the brothers were banging on pots and pans and who knows what else from outside the chapel door, hacking away at these objects to create pandemonium over the congregation. That sounds innocuous enough, but the brutality of the shift—-from tender harmony in soft light to dark cacophony—-was jarring. Shaking, even. Behind me, I heard one of my friends sniffle. Fear, even just a quick moment of fear, does that to a person; it leaves you trembling even after it has passed.

Amid the scraps of twittering nerves, we understood the point. Extinguishing candles slowly to plainsong looks beautiful, but it commemorates something appalling. We left him alone in the outer dark, where it was cold, and where the only thing around was the hungry beast Chaos, fighting for a place at the foundation of the universe. Not some beautiful agony set to an orchestral soundtrack, but sheer chaos, sharp things gleefully cutting around him, into him; cold, ugly, violent fear—-that was what love took on for us. It went into shadows, which, incidentally, is what “tenebrae” means.

We processed out of the chapel, into the echoing foyer. Somberness lifted and chatter sprung up. We went for drinks across the road. After an hour passed, I couldn’t feel the fear any more. I could remember feeling that way, but the sensation was gone.

Smudge

I almost forewent the ashes today. It’s a strange holiday, a day when you hear a reading reminding you not to do your good deeds and your prayer and your fasting to be seen by men, then you turn around and ask for a penitent’s mark in the most conspicuous place possible, to wear around town the rest of the day. The churches are packed. Everyone wants ashes. Plenty leave mass as soon as they get them, before communion, parading their own disregard or ignorance of the reason for the ashes, and thereby creating an irresistable temptation for those who stay behind to feel self-righteous. It’s a mess of misplaced movtives.

That’s not why I almost skipped the ashes, though. My reason was banal: I was busy. I was as busy as I’d ever been at work, and didn’t I have a duty to my employer? Could I really justify not only slipping out for mass at noon, but to a mass that was guaranteed to take twice as long as usual?

But then there I was in front of the line, and Father Arne was rubbing his thumb in the little brass bowl and lifting it to my forehead for a smudge. Remember, Man, that you are dust and to dust you shall return.

After that there was nothing left to do but go back and crouch in the hallway—the chapel itself being completely full—until mass resumed. I couldn’t leave now that I’d gotten my ashes. (A whiff of self-righteousness—or was it jealousy?) And what happened then? A thought, a picture in my mind of a beach, my jeans rolled up above my calves, my feet pressing into the wet, coarse sand, and a person waiting in the foam, holding onto a little rowboat, asking me where I wanted to go. I said I didn’t know. He laughed.

Advice

May you always keep a fresh face to the world.
Resist the downward tug in your cheeks; recognize, see the way
the creases of your lips tend to pinch together, and fight it. Lift!
Keep your cheeks fresh and soft, like babies’ butts.
Or, get acne if you need to
and hold on to the embarrassment of not being ready for the world.
You’re best when you’re tender like that.
Wear your scars inside. Bury them
deep in your viscera, mark up your lungs,
your liver, your heart, your pancreas.
Feel them inside as much as you have to, as much as they mangle you up,
but then save them for the autopsy.
That is the secret to a clean face, to a forehead
with no thin lines, to a kind of lightness around your temples
that raises your lashes, opens your eyes, making them enormous orbs, deep and bright.

A Most Capital Bird

What is it about the vulnerability of a flock of ducks crossing a busy street that makes a human heart ache? Tonight as I left the office I saw in McPherson Square Park a whole convention of mallards had gathered, dozens upon dozens of green headed males waddling and quacking alongside their brown-headed lady mates.

Not all of the ducks had made it to the park, though. In the crosswalk at 15th Street, several more pairs were waddling their way across traffic lanes, stopping to peck at the crumbs and fast food bags they found along the way. They seemed happy, in that high spirited, we’re-dallying-on-our-way-to-a-holiday, ducky sort of way.

Watching them, I felt a clenching sensation in my chest. Dusk was failing, and the ducks were barely more than silhouettes--and low to the ground at that. The stoplights were red in all the right directions for the time being, so that the busy intersection was clear of cars. But that would soon change, and the headlights of the taxis and towncars would bear down on the birds, neither seeing nor caring for the peril.

Danger. Danger! I almost ran out into the street to spook the ducks and hurry them along to safety on the far curb. Something held me back; I’m not sure what. So instead I stood watching on the corner, twisting my fingers in my pockets. The lights turned green. A big maroon taxi, headlamps blazing, came careening down the turn lane. In a moment more, he would sweep right, right into the place where the last mallards huddled, oblivious. The car came, took the corner fast. The ducks had mostly had the time they needed--thanks to some incredible dumb luck, it seemed--but there was one male who was still dawdling. From the opposite side of the street, I couldn’t judge the distances and angles. I didn’t know if he would make it clear. I watched and listened for a thump, squawk, and feathers.

He was safe. The car passed, and I could see the last mallard hopping up onto the curb, toward the safety of the square, a bit more briskly than he had a moment before. Ducks in the city were still ducks in danger, I knew, but my task of worrying here was done for the day.

So I thought, until I turned ninety degree to cross J Street and saw four more stragglers scampering—as much as ducks can scamper—the other way, toward the Metro station. They seemed to be intent on riding the subway. So was I.

I overtook them at the top of the escalators. A number of homeless men in old, heavy coats were resting and panhandling under the canopy. When they saw the ducks, they laughed and teased. Then one of them threw a piece of white bread on the cement and the four ducks converged with the shamelessness of wild creatures who must perpetually forage, yes, but also with the silly, high-chinned pride and grace which is forever a duck’s, no matter his country.