I was seated at a long wooden table in a coffee shop somewhere near Anchorage, writing a love letter to my wife. Through a skylight came a copper-tinted light, neither bright nor dim. A man entered and took a seat at the far end of the table. I noticed him first for the graceful way he walked, even though he looked to be in his 80s. He sat sipping his coffee and reading Book I of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, in which the old emperor fondly considers the people who had been his teachers. At some point he sidled over, nearer to me. We got to talking, he in his heavy English accent and I in my Minnesotan.
As if he’d already known I’d be interested, he began telling me about the mentorship he’d had from birds.
“When I was young, mid-teens,” the falconer began, “I was already a skilled falconer. I had imported birds from a gentleman in Tennessee. There were two. Both peregrine falcons. Quite difficult to train at first, but I had all the accoutrements. The thick leather glove they would land on, the hoods, the little bells around their legs, and so on.”
I shifted in my seat, drawing my chair a few inches closer to the table.
He paused, watching me. “I hope I’m not disturbing you. I sense you’re busy.”
“No, please,” I said. “I’m listening.”
“You see, I learned from the falcons, not only the art of catching prey, but also the ways of evil. The birds held a great deal of anger. I’d come to understand it was their desire not simply to catch food for sustenance, but to rip apart their prey.
“Being young, watching them destroy again and again, I began to live my life like those birds, making prey of those I should have loved, ripping them apart and seeking from them only what I desired. As you could imagine, this led me nowhere good.”
The falconer looked up briefly at me. There was a hitch in his voice. He dabbed his eyes with the corner of a napkin and began again.
“I once stood staring out the window of my flat at a flock of doves,” he said. “They had alighted in an open cobblestoned area. Though they were always present, I’d never paid them much attention. In fact, they bothered me. I found them dismal. Worthless if you must know. Their behavior was, as everyone is aware, a great deal different from that of the falcons. They ate seeds, scraps of food left behind, nothing involving blood. I watched as if it were the first time I’d seen doves.”
The falconer looked over at me, as if to gauge whether what he was saying still held my interest. When he was sure it had, he continued. His voice quieter.
“I stared, nearly spellbound as they pecked together in a kind of dance, each cooing in the way a mother might do for her infant. I had always mistaken this behavior for timidity. Especially among men. Only then did I realize that it was a kind of fierceness. A fierceness for harmony, for peace, for a kind of strength that the falcons could never possess.”
The falconer sipped at the remainder of his coffee. He turned his head toward the window as black thunderclouds hurried across the sky.
“It was as though I had undergone an abduction of my senses. That was how suddenly I turned my whole being toward the doves, toward the peaceable. I found in them something I’d never allowed myself to consider. My own yearning for gentleness, for tenderness. I found in those moments a greater strength than I’d ever possessed. You see, I don’t trust weakness. I fear it.”
Now the sky, which had grown dark as encroaching clouds gathered, brightened for a split second as a bolt of strange horizontal lightning struck. The flash gave way to an extended moment of utter silence. Then came a crash of thunder so terrible it portended the absolute end of the world.
The falconer stirred the last dregs of his coffee and gave a laugh, as though the violent booming were an ironic underscore to everything he’d just said.
“This notion of civility and peacemaking, it’s not for the timid. Not for the faint of heart.”
The man disappeared, dissolved along with his book. A door swung open. I felt a powerful gust of wind. It carried the scent of blue spruce and summer rain. The ink on the letter I was writing vanished. The tin roof of the coffee shop blew away and water entered from everywhere, rising fast above the tabletop where the man and I had just sat. I scrambled onto the counter where years ago a barista once stood.
Another lightning strike. And one more. Not sky to ground. Side to side. The copper-tinted light was no more. I waited for the thunder. Waited for the absolute end of the world.
Waited and waited.
I awoke then from the dream just as my wife left the bed. It was still dark. The birds hadn’t begun to chirp.
Lately, she’s been waking earlier than normal. She creeps out of the bedroom, quiet as humanly possible. She knows I need my rest and knows — intuitively, I think — that I need time to dream.
Lots more time to dream.
Peter Himmelman is a Grammy and Emmy nominated performer, songwriter, film composer, visual artist and award-winning author. This piece was published in his Substack.
