My March 11 Friend

Matt was staring up at the sky, binoculars around his neck and looking quite determined.

I took the bait — “whatchya looking at?” I asked. It was a beautiful sunset with cotton candy skies and a biting wind. Matt explained that during twilight, the crows fly east and he likes to observe them.

He then took me on a journey learning about birds. The Ravens in our neighborhood fly west in the mornings. Apparently, there is also an owl with beautiful yellow eyes nearby that Matt will lay on the ground at 11am to try and see.

Here’s a fun fact from Matt:

Ravens, bees, ants and humans are the only four animals who can communicate about distant things in space/time — a phenomenon called linguistic displacement.

As he handed me his binoculars to see the last of the crows fly east, he said something quite powerful:

“I think during the pandemic, the binoculars have given me the chance to see things from a different perspective.”

I was curious how Matt became interested in birds and he shared that as he was walking to the Farmer’s Market every Saturday, he kept noticing a bunch of bird poop dotting a particular sidewalk; this made him curious.

Some say “stop and smell the roses,” but I think “stop and stare at the bird shit” is way cooler.

An introverted man by nature, Matt opened up about his job waiting tables for the past 25 years and the spectrum of emotion he felt during the pandemic. On one hand, this was his livelihood at a complete standstill but on the other, his job hadn’t made him happy in years — an important truth to confront.

It’s been a hard year no doubt. While I miss concerts and travel, Matt couldn’t relate. He does not like crowds or being around people and the last time he attempted to go to a concert, he turned right around at the doors.

He asked me about mind-body connection and if that was real — personally, I believe quite strongly in this so we dug into where in our bodies we harbor our stress.

The longer we talked, the more emotional the conversation became. We talked about what happiness even means; we talked about pain and grief; we talked about ambition or lack thereof.

Here we were as darkness began to fall, an introvert and an extrovert sharing stories and offering support, advice, laughter and most importantly, time.

I told Matt he should never lower his standards and to start saying no to things that made him unhappy. He reminded me to be curious about the things around me.

As we parted ways, Matt struggled to come up with an answer to my standard question. There was so much going wrong in the world and so many things to worry about that he had to dig deep. He was grateful for our conversation today but upon thinking more, Matt remembered a story.

He was on the bus on Fillmore with a warm baked loaf of bread under his arm and he was upset about something. When he boarded the Muni, though, he observed how much worse other people had it. He realized that no matter his worries that day, at least he had his state of mind to be grateful for.

Sometimes it’s not a “what” or “who” that people are grateful for, it’s a feeling or a state of being.