Homing Pigeons

On the train ride back from Jersey today, I found myself wondering what I would I write today. As my father told me, if you want people to read your stuff, you've got to maintain a certain regularity. Nobody is going to read what you write if it only comes out sporadically and infrequently.

And so, I wondered, what would I discuss today?

I considered speaking of the family celebration I participated in this weekend, but seeing as I've already written about one family party, and also considering that most people aren't that interested in knowing that I had an early Christmas in New Jersey with the maternal branch of my family, which was attended by my aunts, uncles, cousins, and immediate family, I decided against it.



As I ambled down the streets of Brooklyn, coming home from the train, I continued to think about what I'd write. I realized that nobody really wanted to know that I got a lime-green sweater for Christmas, or that my cousin enjoyed my gift of "Gray's Anatomy" accompanied by two burnt-cds featuring Lhasa de Sela on one and Caetano Veloso on the other.

My thoughts were interrupted by the unusual sight of a group of generally aloof, too cool for looking at stuff hipsters all standing on the sidewalk, looking up in awe at the sky, and occasionally remarking "Wow! Look at that!". Wanting to know what could possibly interrupt the heroin-chic, disinterested pose of so many locals, I crossed the street to join them in their looking.

Gazing up, I saw a sight that was familiar, but that I had never really consciously noticed. A huge flock of pigeons was circling around the sky above Grand Street and Bedford Avenue, splitting apart and then joining together again, painting huge, and diverse oval patterns against the azure sky.

Each time that they would reach a certain point, the sun would reflect brilliantly off their whiteness, creating an incandescent orange color that would flicker and glow. It was beautiful, although honestly somewhat less so for the realization that these could very likely be homing pigeons, and not a purely part of a natural phenomenon.



Homing pigeons, as I learned from my father (who used to have some), are pigeons that one trains to return to a specific place. This isn't that hard of task, as pigeons seem to like to return to one place (see, for instance, any major European landmark or plaza), but it does involve the clipping (or tying) of wings during the pigeon's young life in order to inspire a sense of home in the pigeon.

In some movie with Denzel Washington, I saw homing pigeons used as a warning in in a South Central neighborhood that cops were entering the area. I've also seen in some other movie that Mike Tyson is a big collector/breeder of homing pigeons. Apparently shaking a stick at the pigeons makes them fly away. They make a big circle in the air and return home. If you keep shaking the stick at them, they keep tracing circles in the air.

So, I'm thinking that maybe these pigeons were circling around because somebody was shaking a stick at them. Maybe it was a natural path for them to take, who knows? It was really nice to see, though, and it was great to see a bunch of kids in a neighborhood that tends to seem jaded looking up at the sky to see pretty birds fly around in sunlight.