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Eagles and Milli Vanilli   Imagine a majestic bald eagle soaring across the sun-drenched blue sky. Now, imagine the exalted shriek it emits, this lord of the blue heavens as it glides over us pitiful, earthbound mammals.  The sound you just heard in your mind is not the noise an eagle makes. It is the call of a red-tailed hawk. It is the call of those common, nearly ubiquitous raptors that we see everyday, perched on power lines, in trees, and swooping into farm fields in search of mice. Many years ago, filmmakers wanted to use bald eagles as iconic emblems of freedom, power and the splendor of the natural world. The only problem was that their call sounds exactly like that of a seagull – a beach rat, as we New Englanders call them – or like an incredibly whiny adolescent sparrow. They have the distinct timbre of a kid who has had its iPad taken away. So the smaller, more commonplace red-tailed hawk (there are literally millions of them) was chosen to do the voiceover work in Hollywood, and whenever you see an eagle in a movie, TV show or commercial, you are actually hearing the sound of a hawk, not an eagle. I found this out last week, at the age of 42. It is truly incredible how much I don’t know.  I am currently trying to parent an almost-eight-year-old child, and it was the latest in a series of reminders that I don’t have any answers to most of the questions I am faced with, and to make matters worse, I don’t even know many of the things I thought I did know. Every time I thought I heard an eagle for four decades, I was wrong! What else don’t I know? I have no idea! $&@#@*! The thing with the eagles is basically the Milli Vanilli scandal all over again. For those of you who are too young to remember, Milli Vanilli were a wildly successful German/French R&B duo. I think their names were Rob and Fab, or Rab and Fob, or Plop and Bob, or something punchy like that. All I know is that it had a Seussian ring to it.  They were on the radio 100 percent of the time when I was a little kid. Then, one day it was revealed, in an inspired bit of pop culture investigative journalism, that the guys in the music videos, and on the cover of their tapes, and even jumping around on the stage in their concerts, were NOT the people singing on the radio. The guys who we thought were Milli Vanilli were actually models, and the guys who sang their songs were just normal-looking blokes who no one had ever seen before. Then we got to hear Milli Vanilli sing for real, because they mistakenly thought that pretending to be good at something means you are actually good at something. It was the equivalent of watching an actor who had played a doctor on a soap opera perform real life open heart surgery. It wasn’t great. And then, they just went away.  We all had great fun mocking Milli Vanilli, but then one of them fell into a deep depression, began a life of crime, and eventually perished of an accidental overdose, which meant we couldn’t even laugh about the whole situation without emitting a sad little sigh at the end, and remembering just how fragile human beings - even rich, famous, attractive ones who are completely tone deaf - are.  I hope the bald eagle I see sometimes when I go on walks in the countryside near our home doesn’t start robbing banks and drinking Jim Beam by the quart now that word has gotten out that a Red-Tailed Hawk has been doing all his voice work.  I suppose the moral is that I didn’t know what was going on when I was eight, and I still don’t know what’s going on now. I’m pretty comfortable with this - why not be? – and I am reminded of it constantly.  In the last week, my daughter has asked me how helium works, how fish mate and where numbers come from. She asked who the first person was, and which of the gods is the most powerful. She asked on what day wolves officially evolved into dogs.  I like spending time with my daughter, primarily because I get to play the role of sage. Whenever the two of us walk together, holding hands, or as she snuggles up to me in my chair in the living room, I ascend to my metaphorical mountaintop, where I assume the role of a very wise man to whom she has journeyed through perilous lands far, far away. She comes to me seeking wisdom.  And really, our children have traveled very far to see us; all the way from oblivion.  I probably disappoint her at every turn.  “I don’t know that one,” I say. “Ask me something else.” “I’m actually not super good at the metric system, I can look that up if you want me to…” “I have no idea the lifespan of a possum in captivity….” “I think math was invented rather than discovered, but I don’t actually know…” While walking down a wooded trail the other day, Hadley asked me to carry her.  “No, you can walk,” I said. “It’s good for you.” “But dad, my legs! They feel like they don’t have any bones in them!”  “You have bones,” I replied, then paused and remembered how little I know. “I mean, I think you do. I can look it up later.” “But dad, it hurts,” she lamented.  “You are suffering,” I replied, stopping in the snow and turning back to face her. “Suffering is good. It gives our lives meaning and depth. Dostoyevsky said you need to suffer in order to have intelligence and a deep heart.” “You’re saying suffering is good?” “Yeah, sort of. It’s bad, but it makes the things around it better.” It’s like the manure we spread on a field before it blooms.  She stopped and looked up at me, her mountaintop sage, who she apparently journeyed to meet atop weary, boneless legs. I expected her to smile, digest what I had said, and nod, stashing away this wisdom to use as she journeyed on, away from, and eventually far beyond, me.  “Dad,” she said. “You are out of your mind.” “I know, buddy,” I said. “I know.” I thought about quoting Joyce Carol Oates to her. It would have made sense. Oates, when talking about Russian literature, said madness is often a sign that profound truth has blasted away all normality. That madness is sometimes a form of enlightenment. Cormac McCarthy once referred to madness as “a partaking of the godhead.” In the same novel, he points out that each new piece of knowledge we acquire is both a gain and a loss, because it is a closing of every other door, every other possibility.  Or maybe not. I’m not sure.  I kept my mouth shut, and trudged silently along through the melting snow, unsure, but content in the places I was, and perhaps even happy in most of the places I was heading.  On the way home we saw a hawk. I was reminded that I do not know the things I do not know, and I don’t even know many of the things I think I do know. I thought that maybe the false eagle’s lesson isn’t really about me, and what I know and don’t know. Perhaps those hawks we barely notice make the most spectacular sounds and have the most majestic voices. Maybe the moral is that noble, beautiful things are actually all around us, housed in the commonplace things and beings that surround us every day. Maybe all we need to do to appreciate their beauty is forget all the things we think we know, and look up.