A note from the catbird seat
It’s 4:58 a.m. and I’ve decided to rewrite this week’s newsletter. I will post my original thoughts separately when I’m done, but I won’t mail them to you. They’re not bad, they’re just a little mean, even for me, and I don’t want you to wake up to a punch in the face this morning. Or any morning if I can help it.
Plus, I want to write about catbirds and the sweet spot of stupidity. I think of stupidity as clinging to your right to ignorance and I’m being stupid about catbirds. Not forever, but for a while. That’s a long way of saying that I haven’t fact-checked this story beyond Wikipedia and will make claims that I don’t have the background knowledge to make. If you know anything about catbirds, please feel free to correct me. There’s no need to be gentle.
Let’s start with some basic catbird facts:
They’re called catbirds because they sound like cats. They sound like cats to attract mates and ward-off foes. That’s not their only call. Those are the two facts I’m working with. They’ve been in my head for not quite 24 hours.
If you had asked me earlier, I wouldn’t think that birds and cats had been enemies long enough for one species of bird to develop a mimicking call. Maybe that’s naive, but the idea that birds are instinctively afraid of cat noises is worth pulling apart.
I know that we’re different creatures from birds, but think for a second about primal scary sounds, things we don’t have to learn to be afraid of; screams and roars, for example.
I wouldn’t put it beyond nature that the bird has no idea it sounds like a cat. In fact, the more I think about it (without checking) the surer I am that the noise they make accidentally protects them from cats and scares off other birds. I want this to be true very much as I double down on my ignorance and talk about the catbird seat.
It occurs to me this might be anachronistic. I watch a lot of noir and a lot of Buggs Bunny and sometimes forget that phrases from the 40s don’t always hold up. Being in the “catbird seat” might be one of them. It’s similar to “sitting pretty,” or “you’re all set.” It has a pejorative connotation, like, “You don’t have to care because you can’t lose.” To throw it back to nature, you’re getting a mate and not getting hassled all by just doing your thing.
The internet says, “the catbird seat” was coined from a James Thurber short story of the same name. I haven’t read it yet, but here’s a link if you want to read it for free.
It’s crazy that we probably know more about catbirds now than Thurber did, especially if we go with my theory that it’s only a coincidence that the bird sounds like a cat. I like wondering whether that’s true and whether or not Thurber knew that and how it affected his story and the idiom that came from it. There’s something cozy about my ignorance that’s worth digging into.
Since I don’t know, I can speculate. Speculating is the lowest rung on the creativity ladder, the “what if.” It’s cozy because it lets us make something without work, skill, practice or talent. It stretches the imagination muscle without challenging it.
The next step is research. Having asked the question I now have to read Thurber’s story as well as a raft of articles about catbird evolution. It could easily take a couple of hours to find out that everything about this is boring. Or I could just believe that the birds make that noise accidentally and that Thurber didn’t know it and that, “being in the catbird seat” doesn’t match up with the facts about catbirds.
Like lemmings, right? If you don’t know, Disney drove a bunch of lemmings off a cliff for dramatic purposes. It’s like setting someone’s house on fire and then saying, “Humans jump out of windows.”
The reason it matters to me today is I want to say the two meaner stories I wrote are written from the catbird seat. I have nothing “really” invested here. After 30 years, I still feel colonial or anthropological as if observing the natives (several of whom are now related to me or among my best friends).
As a permanent outsider in a closed culture what happens on the Delmarva Peninsula doesn’t reflect anything about me. I write my truth screeds, documenting the ways things are getting worse without having the responsibility to do the work to make things better.
Keep the Faith,
Tony
Postscript
I don’t know if I’m naturally good at being mean or if writing about and covering politics made me this way. I’ve heard that a cynic is a heartbroken optimist and that flatters and appeals to me. I want things to be less mean. I want people who want to help to be in charge, but no one seems to want to help, so the meanest and greediest step in to impose their viciousness on the rest of us. It is a little heartbreaking.
This is a cool Substack for middle-aged people. If you’re an older writer and memoirist, you should know they take submissions. I just got a kick out of this story about moving back home at age 49. I feel like I could have moved back home in my late-40s but not a minute sooner. I wonder if part of “over the hill” is being able to see your parents as regular people and being OK with that.
It definitely has to do with your relationship, though. Your parents also have to be OK with you being a regular person.
Remember, if you get a kick out of this, consider forwarding it along to someone else who might.
TR