As I sat in my Astoria hotel room yesterday afternoon looking out on a flock of Western and Glaucous-winged Gulls that was perched on a deteriorating portion of a long-abandoned dock that the Columbia River had yet to fully claim, I suddenly found myself wondering what would have been had I taken up bird watching while still a boy living in that very same town. The spot where the hotel room now sits is the same place where decades ago my father and I sold the salmon we had caught; we were Columbia River gillnetters. What would it have been like to have been a young bird watcher with such an abundance of gulls, ducks, cormorants, terns, and other coastal birds so close at all times?
Taking up bird watching as an adult as I did, I often feel I missed something by not having had the experience as a child; something important that so many bird watchers I have known recall so fondly but which to me shall forever be a mystery. How much television did I watch when I could have been studying the ducks swimming on Young’s Bay? How much time did I waste “hanging out” when I could have been puzzling out the gulls in flying about the West End Mooring Basin? The very thought itself strikes pain in my heart when I consider too deeply.
Such is mid-life. The “what if…” questions come all too frequently; most without answers – or worse, with answers the truth of which one cares not to admit. Lingering too long upon them will most certainly lead to despair, thus it is best to pause only briefly to acknowledge the lesson to be learned from them then begin making plans for the future to act accordingly.
I generally do not make New Year resolutions; they are too soon forgotten and left unaccomplished. Better simply to set a general course for personal improvement and let the details emerge as they may. Time once lost can never again be found; thus paying closer attention to the choices I make each day shall be my motto so that upon the dawning of the next year my answer looking back upon the one just completed shall be simply “better.”
May 2010 bring all of us the answers we seek.
