This is one of those “lately, I’ve noticed” postings and it comes in two parts.
Part One. A week or so ago, I observed, but only peripherally, that pigeons sharing our New York sidewalks were not behaving as usual. The usual: I’d walk along and any pigeons in my pathway would scurry or flap a bit off to the side.
Now, I do not threaten or chase pigeons. If a pigeon happens not to give way, I’d give way. Who wants to bump into a pigeon? Not I.
But pigeons are not automatically ceding position anymore. They’re not being aggressive; we have not flown into a Daphne du Maurier landscape. Not yet, anyway. But these pigeons…they do not kowtow to us larger creatures. It’s as if they’ve all decided not to grant us preeminence on the sidewalk any longer.
As I said, that was merely a peripheral observation.
But yesterday something more happened. I was walking on Broadway around 84th Street, heading home. I walk fairly fast. I came upon a pigeon who was around two feet to the side of my two feet. He was not walking so much as ambling, slowly. As I started to pass him, he moved closer to me, now only around a foot away, and sped up his movement until he was walking alongside me at my own pace.
He was, in short, accompanying me.
He and I approached the street crossing. Both of us stepped down from the curb, continued across the street, and stepped up onto that curb.
Then he split off toward a tree.
I think this is strange.
Part Two. Among the many changes in my life since November 2016 is that I watch way too much TV — and not only MSNBC.
In fact, I now subscribe both to Acorn TV and to MhZ Choice, a package giving me a cornucopia of European TV series, a lot of which are cop shows, mysteries, thrillers.
I’ve been hooked on MhZ for a while now. But this week, while sequentially watching a Italian cop series, a Swedish cop series, and a German cop series, something weird happened: each of the stories — all of them murders — took us into hospitals, for one reason or another. And in each of those hospitals, there was a beautiful young doctor.
And at the end of two shows, the beautiful young doctor turned out to be the really crazy killer, while the beautiful young doctor in the third series had a suspicious past involving a couple of serial murders.
So, pigeons ignoring me and European TV cop series with serial killers who are beautiful women doctors.
Is this a theme? If so, what should I do about it?