I'm not one for superstitions, but...

In today's Unfit to Print, a New Year's thing

The sun came out one day this week. January 1, 2023. An omen good as any, I would say. So my partner and I went out walking. Lots of folks were out. Not even power walking, just strolling. Some stood just out of reach of the shade, basking in the morning light. A man was walking his cat, and a lot of us stopped to watch its slow creeping, like there couldn’t possibly have been anything better than this to do. And there wasn’t. It was almost as if we hadn’t realized how tightly we had all been holding our bodies—from 2022? from the rain?—until the soft warm hands of the sun said, Come on!, and we let go to it.

My partner and I were playing Pokémon GO along the Embarcadero, as we do. I had just caught a shiny Hoot Hoot with a New Year’s hat and bow tie on it—a rare find—and we were laughing about it. I said “well, my work here is done,” and she said “I’m jealous.” Our backs were to the sun and we were starting to get warm. The sky was the clearest it’s been in months—that California super blue. It was nice to breathe, the way it is nice to eat when the hot food comes to the table looking so beautifully arranged on the plate.

Then I noticed a gull (there are many, many of these all along the Embarcadero, as well as a lot of other birds, including the brown Pelican which never ceases to amaze me. If you have the chance to watch this pterodactyl-looking creature skate along the water in formation, or hover and dive for fish, I am sure you will be equally as amazed).

The gull was having the best New Year’s of its life: on the ground near the Muni rail stop, someone, likely soaked and drunk from the night before, had abandoned a nearly full bag of McDonald’s, along with half a soda. It was placed at the foot of an electrical box at the curb. Just off the Muni platform, close to the two-lane street. It was the kind of spot that revealed the person who bought the food didn’t want it anymore, but had hoped that perhaps someone else would pick it up and finish it. A lot of people live and sleep in the park and on the sidewalk along that part of the Embarcadero.

But the gull had seen it first. I watched it circling around as we walked. Something I like to say in my head every time I see a gull (honest: every time) is, “how do you keep your whites so white?” Their breast feathers are terrifically white, and given where they go, what they do, and what they eat in the City, I am amazed they stay that way. But the line is from an old Tide detergent commercial, one of many old lines from TV and movies that will probably be the only things I remember when I die.

“How do you keep your whites so white?” I said to the gull, in my head. He hadn’t torn open the bag yet. But he clearly recognized the golden arches and what such symbols foretold for his future. He let out a few crisp squawks to alert his foes to his claim on the bag—or invite his friends to join him?—and they came. Just two at first, and then three more. We were still playing Pokémon GO, and hadn’t stopped our slow walk. But I had slipped my phone into my pocket, choosing instead to watch the drama of The Gulls and the McDonald’s Bag. I said to my partner, who was as-yet unaware of the gulls: “Look. That gull got a whole bag of McDonald’s,” I said, “He’s having a good Year.” She smiled at the joke (we were just a few hours into 2023 after all), looked at the gull, and wowed at the event unfolding. But she had unfinished Pokémon GO business—she may have even been mid-throw—and so looked back down at her phone.

I kept eyes on the gulls: two in the air, circling, three in the road, making way toward the bag. None had opened it yet. It was like they were taking their time. Like the day for them, too, was some kind of soft reprieve from everything. I don’t even think the white car was speeding—was it a Cruise? Did it have a driver?—but it came, as cars do, expecting the birds will get out of the way at the appointed time. Two of the gulls walked nonchalantly into the adjacent lane to avoid contact—the car was the only car for miles, it seemed. The third gull, seemingly torn between safety and the food bag was too slow. Too Slow!

“Bird!” I screamed. As if a line drive baseball was hurtling toward a baby, and stricken with fright all you can manage to do is point, and say “Baby!” And then the thunk—an ugly sound of soft bones hitting plastic. The bird had turned its back to the bumper of the car just before it hit, and opened its wings partway. The bumper flexed inward against the bird’s weight; the car barely slowed. I screamed “No baby!” And covered my mouth. When people do this in movies, I think, “No one does that,” but now I wonder if we do it because we have seen it done so many times, in movies.

By now my partner had looked up—her New Year’s gift was not having to have seen the horrible part—and we both watched as the gull narrowly escaped the tire, and stumbled into the adjacent lane. It limped across the road in our direction, to the sidewalk behind us, and kept on walking. One hundred drunken, tiny little webbed-foot steps toward the water’s edge. All the while reordering its wings, pulling them back in, smoothing out his whites so white. And then, like the best of the footballers, that bird just took off flying, like nothing had happened at all.

“Thank God,” I said to my partner. And then, “I can’t believe I just watched a bird get hit by a car and almost die! On New Year’s!” For just a few steps—a few precious seconds—this felt like the most actually and metaphorically tragic thing I could witness on the start of a New Year. And then from some unknown place inside me rose up another, stronger thought: “the bird lived.”

The bird lived.

—MBF