Take My Hand, It's Off To Nether-Netherland

I had been planning to write about the parakeets in Greenwood Cemetary. But Joseph O'Neill beat me to it in his latest novel "Netherland". To punish both him and you, I'm going to post an excerpt from his book, which you should all read. If you already have, read it again?

We drove through Park Slope. A plotter's grin formed on his face. We took a sharp turn, passed under a huge pair of arches, and halted at a prospect of grass and tombstones.

He had brought me to Green-Wood Cemetery.

"Look up there," Chuck said, opening his door.

He was pointing back at the entrance gate, a mass of flying buttresses and spires and quatrefoils and pointed arches that looked as if it might have been removed in the dead of night from one of Cologne Cathedral's more obscure nooks. In and around the tallest of the trio of spires were birds' nests. They were messy, elaborately twiggy affairs. One nest was situated above the clock, another higher up, above the discolored green bell that tolled, presumably, at funerals. The branches littered a stone facade crowded with sculptures of angels and incidents from the gospels: a resurrected Jesus Christ prompted Roman soldiers to cover their faces with their hands, Come forth, a second Jesus exhorted Lazarus.

"Parakeet nests", Chuck said.

I looked more carefully.

"They come out in the evening", Chuck assured me. "You see them walking around here, pecking for food". As we waited for a parrot to show he told about the other birds--American woodcocks and Chinese geese and turkey vultures and gray catbords and boat-tailed grackles--that he and his buddies had sighted among the sepulchres of Green-Wood during his birding days.

I was half-listening at best. It had turned into a freakishly transparent morning free of clouds or natural inconsonance of any sort. Huge trees grew nearby, and their leaves intercepted the sunlight very precisely, so that the shadows of the leaves seemed vital and creaturely as they stirred on the ground--an inkling of some supernature, to a sensibility open to such things.

There was still no sign of parrots. Chuck said"This is by the by. There is something else I want to show you."


That about sums it up. If you're still reading this, you get a cookie.