Moon Politics
I was born in a gutter. I suppose that’s not the sort of thing you’d say if you were hoping to impress the person you’re speaking to.
The gutter was behind a bakery. This was considered fortunate. At least, that’s what my mother told me.
“You could have been born behind the butcher’s.” she’d always say.
I didn’t know what a butcher’s was at the time. I only knew that it was apparently worse than a bakery, and that this was somehow relevant to my future.
My first memories are of rain. Not of the rain itself, cold as it was pouring down and saturating my feathers. Rain was ordinary. The city produced it prettymuch constantly, as far as I could tell. My memories are of the sound it made against the cardboard beneath us, and the sound of my mother’s voice as she calmly explained that there were things in the world that happened for reasons we’d probably never understand.
My before-first memories are probably of my father, who I already knew was no longer in the picture as my mother cradled me beneath her wing through those stormy nights. His absence was another one of those things that could only be explained by the absence of any rational reasoning. As if the things that happened were decided upon by a group of strangers in a faraway place with no concept of the context or consequences.
Or a bunch of blind and deaf politicians were governing our lives from the moon.
But I didn’t know what the moon was, nor did I know what politics were. Neither did my mother. That was precisely the point.
Every bird knows about Moon Politics. Not every bird calls it that, of course. Some call it the Great Pattern, or The Arrangement. The sparrows in the eastern district call it Providence, though I’ve always kinda suspected they stole that word from somewhere else. The ravens nesting in the park probably call it something edgy and cool but they don’t talk to pigeons so I’ve never found out what.
My mother called it Moon Politics because she heard an old pigeon say it once, and old pigeons are considered authorities, since they’ve survived long enough to become confident about things they couldn’t possibly know.
The simplest definition, I can give, however, is as follows:
Moon Politics is the reason things happen.
Why is one bird born in a warm attic and another born in a gutter? Why does one nest survive a storm while another one doesn’t? Why does a hawk appear precisely when you’ve found something worth eating?
Why might a beautiful hen choose the most insufferable male in the entire square? Why do some birds spend their entire lives looking upward and others never seem to notice the sky at all?
Nobody understands it, but everybody has an opinion. This is an important distinction.
As a chick, I believed the world was structured according to some invisible system of karma or fairness. If a bird was good, good things should happen to it. If a bird was cruel, something unpleasant should eventually happen to the bird.
This seemed obvious, until the day I watched my brother fall out of the nest.
He was not cruel. Or foolish. He’d just hatched on the side closest to the edge.
My mother watched him disappear, a grim expression across her visage as she turned to me sadly.
“Moon Politics.” was all she said.
I hated those words. Not because they were wrong, but because they were useful. Anything could be explained by the term.
A missing crumb? A broken wing? A beautiful hen choosing a stupid, ugly meathead as a mate instead of an intelligent soul from the gutter behind the bakery?
Apparently all a result of the enigmatic machinations of Moon Politics.
That last matter occupied my attention for much of my adolescence.
A hen named Clara lived three rooftops away. Her feathers were the color of winter clouds and she had a brilliant white mark beneath her left eye. She was graceful, clever, and entirely uninterested in me.
I spent months trying to figure out why.
Another male from the square was named Arthur. He was enormous. He was also stupid. I mean this with affection and smoldering jealousy: Arthur could have probably gotten lost in a puddle.
And Clara adored him.
One day, an elderly crow noticed me watching the two longingly as they floated together on the breeze. He looked at me for a long time, and finally said just two words.
“Moon politics.”
I responded by telling him that’s not much of an explanation. He told me that was because I was young.
I eventually learned that being young and being wrong are considered the same condition by older birds.
When Arthur and Clara formally became a pair, I pretended not to care. I cared enormously. I became convinced that the world was fundamentally unjust.
Then, one overcast day in the midst of autumn, I discovered the bakery’s loading dock.
There were crumbs there. A lot of crumbs.
I began spending my mornings on the roof above it, looking down over the society that ticked ever onward, and that’s when I discovered that the birds who lived higher up were treated a lot differently.
The birds in the gutters were starved and raggedy, but those on the awnings were comfortable and fed.
The birds on the church roof were treated with respect and deference.
The birds on the clock tower were mysterious and given a wide berth.
Nobody knew why these things worked the way they did. That’s just... How they were.
One day I decided to start climbing. Not literally, of course. Pigeons aren’t particularly good at climbing. I mean socially.
I learned which roofs were safe, which windows belonged to kind humans, and which balconies had cats. I kept track of which restaurants discarded bread that was still edible. I leaned which birds would tolerate strangers, and more importantly which birds pretended not to tolerate strangers but secretly enjoyed having the company.
My biggest lesson was the realization that a bird could be born in a gutter and still eventually find itself somewhere with a nice view.
That’s when I began to understand what my mother had meant. And what all those old crows and crotchety owls would preach until there was no one left to listen.
Moon Politics didn’t determine where you started, nor did it determine what happened after that. Perhaps it didn’t really determine anything.
That was the difficult part. You could never tell.
I’ve met birds who believed everything happened for a reason, and I’ve met birds who believed nothing happened for a reason. I’ve also encountered a couple of folks who believe the world is ruled by a benevolent intelligence, and at least one crazy quail who believed the world was ruled by a malicious intelligence.
I even met one especially memorable seagull who believed the world had no intelligence whatsoever. He was the happiest bird I’ve ever met, and I disliked him immediately.
Years later, I understood why: he was free of Moon Politics.
Or at least he thought he was.
There is a great temptation when one begins to rise in the world, and that is to believe one’s rise was inevitable. I was guilty of this, myself.
I told myself that I had survived because I was clever, found food because I was observant, made friends because I was kind, and found love because...
Well, that part never made much sense.
Her name was Avery. Funny name for a bird. But I won’t say any more about her.
Not because she was insignificant, because she was not. But Avery taught me that some mysteries are better preserved as mysteries.
There were times in my life when I thought the entire universe conspired against me, and other times where I thought the guys pulling all the strings had finally decided to call my number.
Then, one morning, I watched Avery disappear over the horizon as she flew away with another bird.
For the first time in my life, I laughed. Not because it was funny, but because I suddenly understood.
The universe hadn’t conspired against me.
It had simply failed to notice me.
There was something tremendously comforting about that.
I was not cursed. I was not chosen. I was not being rewarded, or punished.
I was a pigeon. Born in a gutter.
Sometimes I found bread, sometimes I found nothing. Sometimes it rained, other times it did not.
Sometimes love was mutual. Other times, well, it just wasn’t in the cards. And none of it required an explanation.
Nowadays, I still believe in Moon Politics. However, comma, I no longer believe it explains anything.
When you’re young, you want the world to have a reason. But once you get older, you become grateful that it doesn’t.
I’ve spent my entire life surrounded by birds who insist they understand Moon Politics. They’ve solved the mystery of the Great Pattern. They know exactly what to do and where to be and what to say to make sure everything happens as it’s supposed to.
But they don’t. Neither do I.
I have noticed something, though.
The birds who claim to understand it are always looking upward.
The birds who have stopped trying to understand it are usually looking at each other. Or, occasionally, at the ground. There are often bread crumbs on the ground. I’ve learned not to overlook the obvious.
Oh, incidentally, my name is Weston.
I know this because once, many years ago, a little girl sat beneath the tree where I was resting and called it out.
“Weston!”
I looked around. There was nobody else. She laughed. I flew away.
I’ve never been entirely certain whether she was speaking to me or not.
But I liked the sound of it. So I kept it.
The End