The Weekly Screed (#586)

A text grows in Brooklyn
by David Benjamin

BROOKLYN — Part of my path to the coffee joint each morning is the sidewalk on Willoughby Avenue. On my right is St. Lucy’s, which is solid brick and doesn’t change from day to day. On my left is a row of linden trees that have to be watched vigilantly, because they barely get through a week without doing something new and lively.

Lately, the linden’s helicopters are green. They’re not really helicopters; they’re seed carriers. Peterson’s field guide calls them parachutes; my Smithsonian handbook calls them (ugh) bracts. But they were always helicopters to me, and they’ve often made me wonder if Leonardo da Vinci had in his backyard a linden tree (Peterson and the Smithsonian prefer “basswood” but come on! How much less charming would one of Berlin’s prettiest walks be if it were called “Unter den Basswoods”?). It was da Vinci who designed the first mechanical helicopter. There’s a perfect model of his whirlybird at a little museum on Amboise, France — where the great polymath died in exile.

Here’s how linden helicopters work: Attached to each little copter wing is a cluster of seeds. In a month or so, the seeds mature and dry up. When seeds and wing are both brown and feather-light, a helpful July breeze comes along. It breaks the seed-copter free from its limb and then: poetry in motion. The wing captures air on its underskin and defies gravity, spinning gently as it descends, following the breeze beyond tree-shade, into the sunlight, giving its passenger-seeds hope of germinating into a linden sprout.

Of course, when I was a kid, I would pick linden-copters off the branch, hold them high and let go, watching the phenomenon that certainly inspired Leonardo 500 years before. It was my nature not to leave well enough alone. I ended up at the Tomah Public Library, devouring books on trees, then other plants, then bugs, then… Well, eventually, I completed a one-kid pillage of the library’s entire natural history collection. When I tried to check out a birds of North America book that was roughly eight inches thick and weighed slightly less than Sugar Ray Robinson, the librarian — gently — told me it was a reference book. It had to stay in the library. At the time, I thought this unjust.

Despite such setbacks, I learned — as did da Vinci — the difference between heavier-than-air and lighter-than-air conveyances. The linden-copter, with its load of seeds, is too heavy to really fly. For true liftoff, a plant needs pappi — which has nothing to do with David Ortiz. A pappus is a little lighter-than-air ball of silk attached to a single tiny seed. The best pappus-launcher, of course, is your dandelion, your thistle or your milkweed (also called asclepias). Milkweed pappi are white asterisks floating on the summer wind, and if you catch one, you make a wish and let it go. Milkweeds are also host to those huge, fat, gooey, twin-horned, tiger-striped caterpillars that eat milkweed leaves, which are loaded with latex and poisonous to most living things. These latex-lovers morph gloriously into monarch butterflies, which then swarm around milkweed plants, laying eggs and perpetuating the life-cycle. Then they fly to Mexico.

Speaking of butterflies, it was March this year when I spotted the season’s first red admiral, parked on the St. Lucy’s fence. The butterfly was sluggish from the spring chill and easy to catch. Careful not to rub the dust from his wings, I captured him momentarily and showed him to my wife, explaining the difference between butterfly antennae and moth feelers. When I set him free, I was grateful for the warm winter, but worried that Harper might spot him, too — and eat him.

Harper — after Harper Lee — is a lady mockingbird whose turf covers Brooklyn from around St. Lucy’s to the Francis Scott Key Middle School. I pass a lot of Key kids on my way to coffee. One day while Harper was perched on the St. Lucy’s fence bobbing her tail impudently, a schoolgirl passed both of us, her face buried in a mobile device, her thumbs working furiously on a keypad the size of a commemorative stamp.

I know it’s not fair to this girl that I should wonder about her. Has she ever looked up from her iPhone long enough to discover that her school has a resident mockingbird? Does she know the difference between a red admiral and a monarch; between a moth and a butterfly? Has she ever set loose a helicopter plucked from a tree? Has she noticed that, on her way to school, besides mockingbirds and parachute trees, there is — down the street at St. Mary’s — a rare city-bred fox squirrel and — up the street the other way — a mulberry tree where you can stand for five minutes feeding your face off its branches (unless Harper gets berry-jealous and starts a dive-bombing run)?

It’s not fair for me to ask, because this Key School girl was born into a world where reality — including trees, butterflies, asclepias and heavier-than-air flight — exists more palpably on a three-inch full-color, touch-sensitive, HD flat-panel screen than out here, in the non-pixillated chaos of post-Betty Smith Brooklyn. The girl occupies a vicarious zeitgeist that not even da Vinci had powers to visualize.

According to Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post, who looked it up (probably not in a public library but on an LCD screen), girls ages 14 to 17 sent a median of 100 messages daily in 2011. The average is 187 daily texts. Marcus also cites a survey by Parents and Family Fun magazines, who found that 12 percent of “moms” born between 1977 and 1994 had used their smartphones during sex. For what?

Speaking of sex, the male mockingbirds have arrived. Last week, they were setting up shop on utility poles, each broadcasting his personal Top Forty — all for the sake of Harper, the local hottie. Being “old school” and deviceless, I stood to listen, counting the birds being mocked (10… 20… 30!), guessing birdsongs, convinced that yonder suitor knows Mozart, trying to figure where the one atop St. Lucy’s steeple got a copy of the White Album.

Another Key School kid hurried by, head down, jaws clenched, her thumbs dancing tunelessly. She didn’t seem to be aware of Harper’s nearest serenading beau, who was perched on a dead sycamore branch, far above the tallest linden on Willoughby.

This guy was noodling with Strauss, and showing Harper — with a note of irony unique to mockingbirds — how a killdeer sounds when she’s defending her nest.