Caitlin Burke

Burn Notice debuted on the USA network last summer to a fair bit of buzz, none of which I was aware of, because I don’t have cable and don’t follow the new releases. Recently some friends were talking about which cable shows were worth catching up with, and someone mentioned this one. It has Bruce Campbell in it, so I decided to give it a try. I ended up watching the entire first season in 2 days.

It’s charming and light - a fantastic pastiche of spy novels, American detective stories (especially the Florida-based stories of Carl Hiaasen), tv crime procedurals, and, well, MacGyver. Plenty of shots are fired, and plenty of things blow up, but the action usually doesn’t happen until after a trip to the hardware store. (It’s not just common household objects that are drafted; fondant icing is used in a way that will amuse anyone with mixed feelings about that substance.) Regular narration by main character Michael Westen - a US-agency operative turned private contractor who’s been abandoned by his (government) clients - provides a surprisingly pleasant level of exposition. The hardware-store-first ethos is matched in episode resolutions that have more to do with tricking tricksters, setting bad guys upon each other, and other forms of sweet justice rather than plain vanilla taking down.

The Westen character is anchored by an ex-girlfriend, his mother, and a friend who is a washed-up former covert operative. Gabrielle Anwar is a little too kooky for me as the ex-girlfriend, and her accent is basically a case study in how not to do whatever accent she’s trying to do. His mother is played by Sharon Gless, of Cagney & Lacey fame, and there is at least one major nod to that series in season 1. The washed-up ex-operative is played wonderfully by Bruce Campbell.

I still don’t have cable, so I haven’t seen any of season 2’s episodes, but I will. Its nice combination of a big story arc with compact, episodic stories, and its overall sense of great fun almost make me want to read all about it at Television Without Pity before I get my hands on the new stuff.

Almost.

Yesterday on my bike ride, I saw another person in a park gazing awe-struck at a raptor. This is the third time in a couple of weeks I’ve seen this. I’m in favor of anything that causes someone to stop and recognize the immediacy of nature, red in tooth and claw, but they seem to gaze with a reverence that is usually reserved for rarity. Raptors are not rare in San Francisco - several kinds of hawks are very successful throughout North America, except in the high arctic and in unbroken forest, and the Bay area is both a good place for raptors and right on a major migration route.

The red-tailed hawk, which is sighted thousands of times a year according to the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory, is considered a “least concern species.” In some ways, human development has benefited these and other hawks, by giving them poles to perch on and a mix of cleared and standing trees to provide hunting grounds and nesting areas. The Cooper’s hawk and the sharp-shinned hawk are the other most commonly sighted hawks here, thriving as they do with access to a mix of clear and wooded areas. The sharp-shinned hawk sticks to denser tree cover than some of the others, in part because this smaller hawk is sometimes preyed on by Cooper’s and other larger raptors. Ospreys - though not a common sight in San Francisco - are regularly present and also considered a least-concern species, in spite of some having been threatened by widespread use of insecticides such as DDT in the middle of the last century.

Around Lake Merced and in Golden Gate Park, raptors often keep an eye out for little rodents and other small mammals on the ground. Yesterday’s bird - a red-tailed hawk - was sitting on top of a streetlight, scanning around the road toward the golf course beside Lake Merced (perhaps thinking that if that runner kept staring, frozen, it would eat like a king that night). I’ve seen hawks successfully grab a meal in the park, too - once, memorably, mere feet away from a toddler that was excitedly babbling to his mother about the gopher that had just peeked out of its hole.

The Golden Gate Raptor Observatory conducts counting and banding activities every fall, educates the public about its activities, and reports its findings about raptor populations flying in the Bay area. Donors receive an annual newsletter and season sightings summary.

Appalachian Journey and Appalachian Waltz - Yo-Yo Ma, Edgar Meyer, and Mark O’Connor

Blueberries

The 30th Anniversary Edition of The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins

Bike rides in San Francisco - through Golden Gate Park, along the Ocean, out Skyline, around Lake Merced, over to Fort Point

Mad Men, Deadwood, and The Adventures of Brisco County Jr

Old National Geographic magazines

… and Batman - Year One, The Dark Night Returns, The Killing Joke, Arkham Asylum: Serious House on Serious Earth, Prey, Night Cries, The Long Halloween, and The Man Who Laughs

I live in my current apartment but instead of a U-shaped hallway around a stairwell, it has one long hallway to the back of the building with a single door leading to a back yard and patio. Some of the neighbors leave the door open, reasoning that the back yard is fairly secure. We let our pets out there.

My next-door neighbor is a movie buff who collects weird things that had belonged to the stars. She works in a law office or maybe some kind of political organization, and she isn’t home very much. I work at home so I can spend a lot of time outdoors during the day. Sometimes my cat takes walks with me.

A mountain lion had started hanging around the building. It is large and black. Sometimes it stretches out in the street or on the sidewalk outside the building. I wave my arms and yell whenever I see it. I stop letting my cat out. If he whines a lot when I go to the door, I tuck him into my shirt instead of letting him walk on his own. Soon, every outing involves seeing the mountain lion, and because we are in the middle of the city, the Park Service refuses to come and remove it.

I come home one day surprised not to see it in the street. When I get inside, I see it in the hallway, lying on the floor between my door and my neighbor’s. She is at work, and I go there to return her keys. She works in an office that circles around 2 sets of escalators and takes up several floors. She is avoiding me, and I keep catching little glimpses of her from the escalator well. The receptionist tries to track her down for me, but although she is extremely competent, my neighbor eludes her as well. Finally we speak. She says she doesn’t understand why there is a problem and repeatedly asks me to keep my voice down because she is at work. Whenever I start to give her the keys, she pushes my hand away. She talks to me for a few minutes at a time, then vanishes, then reappears, over and over.

I go back to our apartment building, still with her keys, and our hallway has been transformed into a garden courtyard. Another neighbor is crouching down, reaching out to the mountain lion, making kitty-kitty noises at it. I scream at the neighbor, grab him, and push him behind me. Then I wave my arms and yell at the mountain lion, walking toward it on tip toe. The mountain lion does not move.

I open the neighbor’s front door, and the mountain lion brushes past me, leaping into the apartment, where it finds a filthy life-size doll representing a child of about 6 years old, lying in the middle of a main room cluttered and stacked with memorabilia. The doll has human hair on its head, delicately painted features, and one remaining eye. The mountain lion rolls around in the small clear space with the doll and then drags it by an arm out of the building through the back yard and disappears.

He was a good-looking man, in that brawny, sharp-eyed Nordic way. He’d grown up locally, in the Scandinavian neighborhood, near where I lived, where there’s a Lutheran church on every corner. His dad had been a fisherman, but that life wasn’t for him. He joined the police force out of high school, married his childhood sweetheart, and had two kids by age 22.

When I met him, he was 30. He’d been promoted and divorced. He was working on the bachelor’s degree that police officers get when they want to be promoted again, in “SoJo” (”Law, Societies, and Justice”). From the very first day, he sat beside me in Hindu devotional poetry class.

We read songs of Krishna and of Kali. The professor enraptured our small class with lectures and slide shows about cultural context and the art that illustrated, adapted, and alluded to the poems we were reading (in translation). It was a quarter of passion, reverence, earthiness, and transcendance. Heady stuff for lonely people.

He walked me out after class from that very first day. He often carried my books. We had coffee or a quick lunch before we went to our respective jobs. I was a returning student, too. He could relate to me. He could be honest with me. Not like these kids running around underfoot; they had no idea how hard life was. Sometimes he dropped me at my office in his ancient, beloved (but not suspiciously so) BMW, which was always illegally parked. Absolutely always, as if he saw a legal spot and an illegal spot side by side and chose the latter every time.

He was angry about things. He was angry that he felt pressured to go back to school. He was angry that he was expected to pay for parking. The divorce had been ugly, and his ex-wife was no longer in their children’s lives. He was very angry about that.

He was especially angry about the isolation he felt, having almost every moment of his day scripted by work, school, or his children’s activities. He loved them, don’t misunderstand, but he was overwhelmed. Like many overwhelmed people, he had a hard time accepting that there just wasn’t enough time. He could not simply be a good student, work toward the next step - the next three steps - in his career, and then be the best dad he could the rest of the time. Something was missing, and he felt entitled to it, and if he didn’t have it, it was someone else’s fault.

“When you’re a single parent, you can’t meet anyone. No one wants to get involved with someone who already has kids.”
“I don’t know. I like kids.”
“Where the hell were you five years ago?” He didn’t say it in a funny way.

I caught myself wondering, even though I knew I hadn’t been in the right place for him. I was a returning student, but I had only worked for a couple of years. It wouldn’t have hurried his promotions to be picking up his girlfriend at the local high school. I’m sure that never occurred to him. Unless it did. Maybe he just needed a good babysitter.