The Mourning Dove

When the pandemic and the shutdown first started in NYC, I found myself (ok, we all found ourselves, but this is my story) at home and idle in the morning, during the time when I would have been commuting. While the early days in NYC could get very loud with sirens, there were also periods of silence, which could feel peaceful or off-putting, in the same way that the idleness could be relaxing or distressing. Sitting around in that idleness and silence, I started noticing a new bird sound with a pleasing lilt, like hoo-hoooo. 

 A confession, one in which I’m assuming I’m not alone: when I think of animal life in NYC, I think only of pigeons and rats. Since moving to Washington Heights three years ago I’ve added skunks (thankfully, just that one on Overlook) and groundhogs (I live close to Fort Tryon Park), but really it’s just pigeons and rats. Hearing this clearly-not-a-pigeon sound, it felt a little magical-- what, some new mystery bird? That I hadn’t noticed it until the pandemic shutdown felt significant, but I couldn’t say why. Three years of not noticing this bird sound, and now, in such a time as this, my ears finally pick it up. And so a new pattern emerged, of sitting in my living room each morning, and at some point hearing this bird. This was a period in which I had become severely depressed due to the personal/social crisis at hand, and hearing that bird was always a bittersweet part of the day, which was a relief from other periods of unrelenting bitterness. 

 After a month, I finally started wondering what kind of bird it was. I spent some time on YouTube poking around, which was fruitless, until I remembered a new Facebook friend, someone I’d met at a dinner party a few months before the shutdown. I described the phenomenon to him, and he immediately knew: my mystery bird was a mourning dove!

 As someone who loves words and wordplay, the homophones of “mourning” and “morning” struck me. This had been my “morning” bird; but why was it a “mourning” bird? A little Googling, and I read that others hear the sound of mourning in this bird’s noises. I can hear how they hear that, but I was annoyed at this unbidden meaning-- previously, I had just heard the sound of the bird, this sorta sweet, mellow hoo-hooo, and that’s all it was to me, a lovely sound. Now I felt this social pressure to hear mourning in it and, especially during a time of such great pain and anguish and loss in the city, I didn’t want this bird sound to be piled on to that experience. The sirens were a much more immediate and obvious symbol; why not just let the bird sound be what it was, a sound?

 Soon after, I was bird-watching on the benches at Bennett Rest, and I was able to pick out the mourning doves from the pigeons. Seeing them, it felt easier to separate them from this meaning of “mourning”-- nothing about the bird’s appearance (and, to me, nothing about their sound) automatically suggested mourning. I was able to shrug off this “mourning” meaning further when I found out that my partner, who’d only heard me talk about the bird, had been hearing me say “morning” dove. To us, it simply was a “morning dove,” and we could leave it that way if we wanted, since there’s no spelling in talking. 

 All of the above happened in April and May of this year. This past month, I had the (privileged) opportunity to leave the city for a week, and to vacation in a house deep in the woods. It was very, very quiet there-- well, actually, there was often a nonstop chorus of crickets (or cicadas? A further confession-- I really have very little nature literacy), but compared to the city, nature’s cacophony can sound pretty damn peaceful, right? I enjoyed the time away from work, away from wearing a mask outside, and just away from all the ways I associate civilization with our current crisis. I was still aware that this was just a vacation, and that I would need to brace myself for the transition back home. 

 The transition started on the second-to-last day of the trip, when I was outside in the afternoon, and heard a mourning dove. Damn classical conditioning! Immediately I felt uneasy, feeling echoes of that person last spring who sat helplessly in an apartment while illness raged across the city. Despite my desire to leave this bird and its sounds free of imposed meanings, I couldn’t help it-- the bird reminded me of (what I’ve noticed many of us are calling) “all this.” Dammit. Damn. It’s just a bird and a lovely sound! Must it be “mourning”? Must it remind me of my own mourning? I don’t want it to be this heavy, complicated thing, bundled with associations of anxiety and desperation. I want it to be light and simple and pleasant, like the sound of the bird. I worried that my return to the city would be a return to the overpowering weight of the crisis mindset, and this small sound was calling me back.

 Fortunately I’ve had (the privilege of) some good therapy, social support, and psychiatric medication over the last five months, and my return to the city did not trigger a relapse. I haven’t heard a mourning dove since I got back, but I look forward to it. I think back to the one I heard in the woods, and how it wasn’t a city bird, and therefore was far from (where I associate with) the pandemic. And, of course, neither the city mourning dove nor the mountain mourning dove are aware of the pandemic, or my associations, or their own name. But I am, and so when I hear the mourning dove again, I expect it to feel very close to me, and very far away.