ENOUGH TO MAKE THE HEART SING
My morning commute takes me past a landmark that’s been known affectionately in our family for some years as Goose Poo Park.
An elbow of public land that wraps around a section of waterfront at Prince of Wales Bay, its proper but less evocative name is Giblins Reserve.
Following the contours of the park’s waterside edge is a concrete path that’s popular with dogwalkers, joggers and tricycle-riding toddlers. It’s also popular with the local gaggle of geese, a loud and confident mob whose slimy green deposits were the inspiration for our revision of the park’s nomenclature.
Ducks live there, too, and at certain times they cross Gepp Parade in numbers to graze on the nature strips on the far side of the road. They cross in single file, creating a traffic-calming measure much less resented by drivers than the nearby speed bumps.
Goose Poo Park is an ordinary enough place. There’s a barbecue shelter, some standard play equipment, a park bench or two, a doggie-bag dispenser and a vista that’s a whole lot better when the tide is high enough to cover up the algae-covered rocks and discarded car tyres.
But on the shores of this unprepossessing little stretch of green – on some mornings, but not others – a remarkable thing happens.
A man feeds the geese in the early morning sunshine.
Perhaps it doesn’t sound much, but each time I pass Goose Poo Park and see the goose-feeding man in action, I slow my car so that I can have as much time as possible in the presence of this small and ordinary miracle.
If I were skilled photographer, I could catch what it is that I see and show it to you, but since I’m not, let’s try words.
Imagine one of those Tasmanian moments when the sky on the horizon is several cloudy shades of indigo, but the morning sun is shining slantwise from another quarter, so that everything in the foreground of the picture is set aglow.
In that foreground, imagine a man in white pants, with a white-sleeved shirt beneath a woven jerkin patterned in shades of blue, and on his head, a white turban. Imagine how the white of his clothing echoes the white plumage of the geese, who gather eagerly around his legs.
Not all of the geese are white. Some of them have feathers of greyish blue that tone with the banded backdrop of the sky, but all the birds reach up their beaks, their neck feathers crimped into a pattern reminiscent of a Tudor ruff.
The man stands in the centre of a circle of these birds – birds large enough to be frightening if they took it upon themselves – and he seems to conduct their movements with his open hands.
I’m not sure why I read this scene as religious. Perhaps it’s the man’s white clothing, or the turban he wears, which likely signals Muslim faith. Or perhaps I’ve absorbed from somewhere the notion that feeding birds is a spiritual practice.
If that’s the case, then the source could be as frothy as Disney – to wit, the old woman who feeds the birds in Mary Poppins – or as august as Paul Gallico’s delicate, tear-jerking novel, The Snow Goose. Either way, I am harbouring some kind of cultural notion that to feed the birds is an act of grace.
Last week, as I drove around the waterfront, a Spotify playlist that I’d chosen in an unthinking hurry threw up one of those slightly spooky moments of serendipity. It gave me the Small Faces song, Itchycoo Park.
The park of which the Small Faces sing is London’s Little Ilford Park, which – just like my little park in Goodwood – was renamed for one of its less wonderful aspects: stinging nettles.
As the song throbbed through the car stereo, it occurred to me that all I had to do was add a syllable – Goosey-Poo Park – and my location, far from London, scanned perfectly!
In that song, it is ducks rather than geese who come out to be fed with a bun, to groove about and be nice in the sun.
But as I tuned in to the song lyrics, driving slowly and watching the goosefeeding man in his glowing white pants, surrounded by his feathered friends, it seemed to me that the Small Faces were singing right into the moment. It’s all too beautiful, it’s all too beautiful, it’s all too beautiful …