Scarecrows

The doorbell rang the other day, and opening up I found a policeman on my doorstep. If it had been Mexico, I would have felt fear and looked around for the neighbors, but it’s Canada, and I was mildly curious as to why there was a cop on my doorstep. He was a railroad cop. Did you know there were such beings as railroad cops? Railroad ties run through my back yard, and I have a crossing next door, and apparently someone shot out the lights for the crossing, and did I hear anything? I wasn’t much help since we’d been in Mexico the week before, and besides, there are poppers going off everywhere, so how would I distinguish the gun from the poppers.

It’s fall. When I take walks now, the peach and plum and pear trees are bare, their leaves turning colors, but the corn stalks are full and the grape vines are black with fruit. And the poppers go off, invisible scarecrows made of sound, just loud pops to scare off the birds. They sound like random gun shots. You get used to them just as you get used to the random fire cracker explosions in southern Mexico that scare off the spirits. In the fruit trees I also see shimmering silver tape in the branches, more scarecrows. I remember how in Mexico the farmers used the tape from cassettes in their corn fields to do the same thing. Unfortunately, often this tape came from the cassettes of sermons given out for free in the migrant labor camps. You’d hope they listened to them first before offering them to the birds for a lesson.

You don’t see human figures as scarecrows standing in fields much anymore. Maybe the birds have caught on to those. But you see them still in Halloween decorations along with the witches in bent witch hats and the sheet-covered ghosts acting like scarecrows with their shivering “booo’s.” What are they warning us off from? Death? As if we needed warning.

Aren’t scarecrows meant to warn us off of good things? Like a field of juicy black grapes that pop in your mouth when you bite down? Aren’t they meant to trick us into avoiding something that would be good for us? And don’t you need to be a bit bird-brained to fall for it? Fall for this fall-shaped figure made the color of falling leaves? L (standing for Lyman, which he didn’t like) Frank Baum’s Scarecrow was convinced that it was he that lacked the brain, not the birds, for standing in a field all day, empty-headed, though as the band America says, “Oz never gave nothing to the Tin Man that he didn’t, didn’t already have,”  and this went for Scarecrow, too. And it served him well to have a head stuffed with straw after all, because when the flying creatures came for him (though they were monkeys, not birds), and strewed his stuffing all over the field, it had merely to be gathered up and stuffed in his clothes again for him to gain his life back, rather like the rattling of gathering bones in the valley of bones in Ezekiel. The Scarecrow was a human scarecrow after all.

I might be a bit of a human scarecrow myself with some of my stuffing removed, and hoping for a bit of wisdom to navigate this land of Oz, and warning people off the field I stand in, “Don’t come here; I’m radioactive (or will be in a few days—can’t wait to see what happens when I cross the border next week to renew my passport, “Yes, ma’am, you say you’ve undergone radiation to set off all our alarms, but now can you prove it?” Of course, the only people who won’t believe the scarecrow will be the border guards, baldness and breastlessness notwithstanding. That could be a disguise! Does the hospital give a border pass, I wonder? And why would they believe that? There’s no warning them off. I can’t wait!)

Meanwhile, in these Halloween days I will fool you, too, when I, a resident of Oz, put on my cap and my prosthesis and walk around in Canada with my secret, looking normal. That’s my disguise. The appearance of normalcy works every time.