News Haven and Nursery Rhymes

What is it about putting all your papers in filing cabinets that makes you feel like your whole brain has been reorganized, neatly slipped into colorful folders? Tax time has come and gone in a far more forgiving fashion than expected. Life is slowly becoming more organized.

New Haven. The city's gray today. Outside our apartment, past the the yellow-flowered curtains hanging at the windows, the leaves are just budding on the maples. The Planned Parenthood office, where protesters like to hang out on the curb Saturday mornings until the police show up, sits squarely in red brick above the parking lot across the street. Later, I might walk down to Koffee, the warm, quirky coffee shop with the big window, its scraggly cement-and-grass-floored backyard decorated by perky parch benches amid the fire escapes of adjoining buildings.

It's just the right size, this city - for me, at least. Big enough to be interesting, with pubs and shops and the newsy, tiny News Haven magazine store crammed in at street level, awaiting discovery. The graceful buildings of Yale campus lift above the streets in arches and Gothic spires. Yet it's also small enough to be manageable. I can walk anywhere in town. On foot in the opposite direction from the city center, I can visit East Rock Park, a woodland crisscrossed by paths and by a river that runs along the foot of the vast red cliff. Redtails nest there on the rocks, woodpeckers drum loudly on the beeches and the pines, and the first kinglets and warblers of spring have begun to appear.

The other day, in fact, I went birdwatching with the New Haven Birding Club in East Rock. We trudged through the rainy morning, spotting two wood ducks, a black-crowned night-heron, pine warblers, kinglets, hooded mergansers and a brown creeper, among the usual assortment of chickadees, titmice, downies, hairies, and the red-bellied woodpeckers that are far more common here than in New Hampshire. White-throated and song sparrows hopped about in the brush, and we even saw a richly russet fox sparrow, mussed and damp in the drizzle. A winter wren made an instant's appearance, long enough to show its jocular, fat and cocky miniscule outline.

After we birded, we took up shovels and shears to help with trail maintenance. I was wet and cold, and so I chose to help shovel, replacing earth in the center of the paths from the sides. Soon I warmed up, shedding hat, shedding gloves and jacket, wiping wet sticky hair away from my cheek with a muddy hand. A good morning.

Speaking of birding, this is one of the finest bird sites I've ever seen, administered by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology:
      The Birds of North America Online

What else is happening? Last night, I got interested in nursery rhymes - I happened to be singing Itsy Bitsy Spider, and started thinking about why it's lasted so long through time. First, of course, there's the diction:

Itsy Bitsy Spider
Went up the water spout
Down came the rain and
Washed the spider out!
Out came the sun
And dried up all the rain,
And Itsy Bitsy Spider
Went up the spout again.

All those T's, B's, P's and Sp's make for some very noisy and emphatic diction - even, and possibly especially, if you chant the rhyme instead of sing it. Perfect for boisterous, shouting children.

Also, I think there's something universal about its message. The itsy, cute little critter, the sudden hard luck, our pity on its behalf - and then its brave return when fortune smiles on it again. Everyone can understand and be pleased with that.

Finally, of course, there's the associated hand motions, always fun. Like tickling a little kid. Or tickling Paul, as the case might be.

I found this website on nursery rhymes, including the macabre Ring-a-Ring-a-Rosies and the more playfully odd Humpty Dumpty:
       Nursery Rhymes on BBC's H2G2

It includes the following delightful commentary:

Indeed, just what is it that makes some nursery rhymes seem rather sinister? Why did the makers of the seminal and utterly spooky British TV series Sapphire and Steel make frequent use of the nursery rhyme? We often think of eerie little music boxes playing spindly nursery rhyme-type tunes in horror films. But why? There's something almost Freudian about the way these invasive melodies can cause the hairs on the back of the neck to rise.

...It's the ability of nursery rhymes to allude to things, their elliptical nature, that makes them so fascinating. They share a lot in common with the Japanese Haiku format. Less structured, perhaps, than their Japanese cousins, they nonetheless contain within them tiny sparks which ignite our imagination. Perhaps Sapphire and Steel were right, perhaps nursery rhymes do have certain strange powers. Often they are evocative, like sudden flashes of colour, or like fleeting memories that bubble up unbidden. Nursery rhymes mysteriously breeze in and out of our lives, a bit like we breeze in and out of life itself.

And I think I'll leave today's entry at that.