Gull talk

I talk to the birds at night. These are laughing gulls that comb the beaches of the Mediterranean coastline lapping against Rome. The gulls come in waves during the months of June and July to lay eggs and hatch their young. They find safe haven in the nooks and crannies of rooftops inside my gated complex.

By day they’re over the beaches like flotillas of white carpets. By night they return to roost, and I, sitting on my terrace, can listen in or speak.

It is the gulls that by far have the most to say. They comment on the changing habits of Rome’s beach bathers, who litter more amply than ever and wear poorly attached swimming gear, far more lax than fifty years ago, when even going to the beach required proper attire. Children wore small white shorts much like the ones I used to wear, and I mention this to the gulls, who in turn say they’re altogether more pleased with the existing disorder because the littering gives them appetizing banquets.

They also point out that there are now a number of McDonald’s near the shore, which makes for delicious leftovers and greasy flying wrappers, another treat.

One older gull repeatedly shakes his head at all these changes, worrying in squawks that his female charges and infants risk growing fat on the rude leavings of this new brand of messy humans.

I reply that Romans have, in fairness, always been messy, the city’s trash bins less popular recipients of waste than city streets. Any windy day was proof of this with its swirls of trash. To which the old gull nods and laughs in knowing agreement.

This same old gull does appreciate one new habit, or, better said, one new toy: the mobile phone. Now he and his protégés can swoop down and steal food unmolested because the citizens of the beach are too busy braying to their own kind to notice that a slice of burger has been made off with into the sky. This new breed of human is bizarre – sometimes they pause to aim their machines at the birds, as if to freeze them.

Freeze them is only a manner of speaking, I tell my old friend. They are having their photographs taken. This makes him laugh more loudly than ever because any distraction simply allows for more poaching of food. One day we will lift a whole human and have him for dinner, my friend adds. “And you can take his picture!” I demur.

Every year, the gull dialect grows more shrill and piercing. This, they say, is not their choosing. City and beach have each become more crowded and noisy. The elders say this is true for the whole of the planet. I cannot take issue.

Something else, too.

Humans everywhere are older, many stooped and frail. The beach is rife with old men and women tended to by the younger ones who themselves are nearing old age.

In unison, the middle-aged gulls, four years old or more, announce that this defies their laws and traditions. They have always known when to break from their eggs, when to learn to fly, when to mature, and, at the first signs of illness, retire to die. This, expounds one gull, is the natural cycle. Make life longer and food diminishes, as does shelter, as does the ability to fly in formation.

“Why do humans extend themselves so?” I am asked, a question to which I have no reply aside to speak of fear, a notion no gull I know understands or cares to. At least not when it comes to unnatural death.

My friends among the gulls fear only the snatching of their young and having to return from the beaches empty-beaked. All else is silly fodder for the so-called enlightened and those who believe in creators and purgatory.

Everything for us is day-by-day, even hour-by-hour, barks my sage old friend. The future is that there will be a dusk and a nightfall and that we will all talk about the day, and then sleep.

And talk to me, I add from my past-midnight terrace.

Yes, he says, and talk to you, the one human friend we have who listens and demands nothing of us.

So it is that a blind man passes his summer nights.