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For the birds
30/03/2007 08:44 - (SA)
Colleen Figg
In my next life I want to come back as a dotty eccentric type, with enough money from a trust fund created by benevolent but disinterested relatives to keep me going.
I'd want to live in an inner city environment, where I could go down to the coffee shop and meet my other odd friends and we'd get along in a sort of Thelma and Louise sort of way, without the cataclysmic, and rather final, departure off a cliff in the end.
I suppose I've always been drawn to those who choose not to be confined by society's expectations, and who create their own worlds and spaces in which they move and live.
In the early nineties I was living in Hillbrow; at that time it was the last bastion for all kinds of eccentric and nonconformist types, they may still be lurking there for all I know, if one could find them amidst the drug dealers and hardened criminals these days.
One of them was a woman who used to feed the pigeons in that little park in Berea; anyone who has ever seen her will certainly remember her. I called her the Pigeon Woman and she was a decrepit old bat with layers of mismatched clothing and cut-off gloves, who used to sport an interesting variety of headgear, from sordid looking beanies to quite extravagant floral jobs.
Birds are better than people
Every morning I'd watch her from my bench, she'd always go to a particular bench one could identify from the stench alone, produced by layers of pigeon excrement over the years, and there she would settle in her multi-hued glory and open her bag of crumbs.
In a flash the dingy park would be filled with hundreds upon hundreds of flapping and insistent pigeons and the old dame's face would be absolutely transported with joy at seeing her friends again.
She'd stand, lit in the weak autumn sun, and with as many birds as could fit on her person while the others flocked around her to catch every crumb. The ground below her was literally heaving with pigeons, and the flutter and flap of their wings was carried across to me.
There was nothing she found more important or fulfilling to do than to feed those pigeons every day, and I, as distant observer, felt that there was something extremely touching about that, and about her relationship with the pigeons.
Clearly at some point in her life she had decided that birds were better than people and dedicated her remaining time to seeing to their needs in every way she could. I don't think she was rich and actually heard that she went to the local supermarkets to get breadcrumbs for her flock.
Once I tried to approach her to ask if I could photograph her and the birds, but she shied away and muttered that she didn't want to talk to people. I could see that my presence in her space actually distressed her, so I took myself away and never took any photographs.
The so-called misfits among us will always get my vote, I realised way back then.
Send your comments to Colleen.
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