Block · one region of the page, as the scanner read it. It may hold a whole story, part of one, several, or an advertisement; stitching blocks into articles is the next step. Text is supplied OCR.
Page 18 · column 1 of 7 · from the scan, no model involved
On a cold New Year's Day in Georgia, 25 years ago, a woodpecker and a refugee from African genocide taught me an extraordinary lesson.
I was at a New Year's open house held by the woman who would later become my wife. A friend of hers had brought with him to the party a newly arrived political refugee from the Congo (then known as Zaire) who spoke ’elegant French but no English.
In an effort to welcome this serious man, a leader who had suffered great pain and hardship, I was trying to converse in my embarrassing excuse for French. But the conversation lagged as I ran out of words, and I turned toward the nearby window, looking for inspiration.
At that moment, a red-bellfe i woodpecker landed on a feeder right outside the glass. Following my gaze, my new friend saw the bird, and I could see his puzzled look as he struggled to understand the contraption to which the woodpecker was dinging
“Pour les attraper [to catch them]?" he asked.
“Non”, I replied, and then paused to muster my rusty French for an explanation.
Now totally baffled, he queried, “Alors pourqud [then why?]”
Finally I said the simplest words which came to me: “P&rce que ils sont belles [because they are beautiful],’' aware as soon as the words came out that I'd made another grammatical mistake.
He stared at me, then back at the bird. I realized then that in the Congo, a land wracked by unending civil war and starva- . tion, a plump woodpecker would be a valuable source of protein. Smaller birds would be caught, caged, and sold in a market. The concept of feeding a wild bird, solely for its own sake, would be totally foreign.
But when he turned back towards me, his face broke out T into a beatific smile. “Farce que ils sont beaux!” he repeated, nodding his head in understanding (while also gently correcting my fractured French). For the next half an hour, he stood silently by the window, watching the birds returning to the feeder with delight.
That this man, who had experienced horrors that none of us would ever want to know about, could still be brought some joy by two ounces of flying
74.0%