November 1999

I have a client in a southern city whose offices crown a 20-story high-rise. We meet in a corner conference room that overlooks a river and affords us a sweeping view. Of course, I do my best to focus my attention on the people in business dress who ring the table.

But occasionally, I am distracted by my high school biology teacher, Louise Schwabe, who told us again and again that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. That is, in the course of our development in the womb, we repeat the patterns of our evolution as a species. For a while we look like a tadpole, and then a baby chick, and then some kind of small mammal, which indeed we are at birth.

I think I have an animal memory of the small dumb mammal part, because I cannot sit at the conference table without suppressing a yelp every time my peripheral vision picks up the shadow, then the six-foot span and black heft of a turkey vulture zooming past me and settling on the eaves just outside the ceiling-high window that frames the head of the table.

The vultures work at 200', and so do I. And while the responsible professional in me engages in meaningful dialogue, the small dumb mammal maps out escape routes around and under the chair of the Chairman and screams "Serpentine! Serpentine!" Yesterday, there were six sharp-beaked carrion eaters outside the windows, as hideous in repose as they are beautiful in flight, perched and preening, then soaring out in search of dead meat, rattling me with every arrival and departure.

No one else inside the glass pays any attention to them. Only my small dumb mammal, and he is keeping his mouth shut, listening to Miss Schwabe, and keeping his options open just in case a window swings open.