Essay: July 7

7/7/96

The Ideal Home Entertainment Center
By Elizabeth Hunter

I’m always behind the times when it comes to popular products. Only recently have I discovered the joys of a Home Entertainment Center (HEC). Most of my fellow Americans recognized the must-have nature of HECs years ago, and shed their outmoded bookshelves, wing chairs, and corner cupboards to make room for one.

I don’t know whether the faithful are still reverently installing those sanctuaries to sound and cinematography, with mammoth speakers, CD players, double tapedecks, tuners, equalizers, VCRs, TVs, and who-knows-what-else standing in for altars, pipe organs, and statues of the saints.

Perhaps HECs are already passe. Too bad, because I’ve seen the light. Normally, I savor silence. But as others recognized long ago, a cacophony of screams, chatters, and scolds is a small price to pay for continuous and varied entertainment options.

One factor that delayed my taking the HEC plunge was lack of space. The typical HEC requires a large, uninterrupted expanse of wall, something my living room doesn’t offer, and I don’t have a den. I finally fell back on a solution I’d resorted to when I bought a chest freezer. I put the thing outside — in the freezer’s case, on the porch. After a year or two outdoors in our humid climate, it threw blue and terrifying electric arcs whenever I lifted its lid. But my sweetheart refloored the porch after the freezer’s demise and has claimed acquired territorial rights to it. That meant the HEC would have to go in the yard, which really limited my options.

Get lemons? ... make lemonade. My HEC solution meets all our needs. As with most high-end models, it has multiple components, is expandable, has high quality surround sound, digital features, and multiple imaging — all this without drawing a watt off the grid. It even has a feature most HECs lack: suet feeders.

Yes, suet feeders. Certain friends of mine are amazed I don’t own a CD player for my stereo (do they still call them that?) or a CD-ROM for my computer. Well, I find it difficult to imagine an HEC without suet feeders. Without suet feeders, I wouldn’t have woodpeckers, and woodpeckers are one HEC feature I could not do without.

In a perfect world, my HEC would be waterproof. But I bought most of my components on the cheap, from an octogenarian I know who spends his time puttering around in his wood shop. I’m sorry to say several components, though less than a year old, already leak and are beginning to warp. Nails that hold them together are working their way loose. I can’t complain, since I paid less than $20 for four components, and about $12 for two expansion units, all of which are still in service, if not in tiptop shape.

If you build it, they will come. Well, maybe. But if you hang it out filled with sunflower seed and suet — and keep it filled — they certainly will. All of them.

The first Home Entertainment Center Cast (HECC) members we were able to recruit were minor characters, at least in terms of size: chickadees, titmice, nuthatches, juncos, sparrows, Carolina wrens, and goldfinches. Then cardinals, towhees, mourning doves, and bluejays started showing up. Eventually three species of woodpeckers joined the troupe: downies first, then the more suspicious hairies, and finally a handsome pair of red-bellieds, who just recently introduced a fledgling to the joys of the HEC. (The pileateds perform flyovers, but only very occasionally alight on a tree trunk at the edge of the yard.)

I don’t remember when the Non-Avian Gymnasts (the NAGs) arrived. Like the poor, they seem always to have been with us, though I remember worrying a few years ago that Sciurus carolinensis had disappeared from my woods. That worry, I now know, was baseless. It is not unusual for every HEC sunflower-dispensing component to have a resident gray squirrel, with understudies lying in wait in the cherry, dogwood, and mulberry trees above — not quietly, either, but with much shaking of tail and scolding).

My arrival on the scene with a small bucket of sunflower seeds to replenish the larders invariably precipitates a NAG display (long jump, standing broad jump, back flip, balance beam, 100-yard dash, relay — lack of television reception hasn’t kept me from watching the Olympics). Anytime I take a notion, I enjoy a furious diurnal 4th of July mega fireworks display from my box seat vantage point. Branches in a half dozen trees explode simultaneously with leaping, scurrying figures as the NAGs head toward the day’s climactic exhibition.

Unfortunately, the tickets are far from free. Sunflower seeds cost me about $15 for 50 lbs., which the NAGs put away in remarkably short order.

Not long after the NAGs arrived, I noticed an influx of chipmunks. They zip across the grass to reach the clothesline supports to make their own assault on the sunflower components. If the grass hasn’t been mowed in a while, all you can see of them on their trans-lawn dash is their little tails skimming above the grassblades like sharks’ fins in the shallows.

In addition to the regular roster, we are occasionally entertained by big-name guest stars. During spring and fall migration seasons, we enjoy cameo appearances by hooded, black-throated, blue, and black-and-white warblers, scarlet tanagers, and rose-breasted grosbeaks.

Like most HEC aficionados, my viewing tastes are fickle. I was ready to grant Most Favored Bird status to two rose-breasted grosbeak pairs who paused for a fortnight with us this spring — until one morning, when they failed to appear. I felt like a fan of a canceled pilot series. Perhaps I can look forward to a brief fall rerun.

Interesting developments have already occurred in long-running dramatic series. A very bedraggled mother hairy woodpecker has been bringing her beautifully coifed and clothed daughter to the suet feeder next to my office window. Daughter waits on a nearby branch chipping imperious orders, and poor mother loads up on suet to poke down the gullet of her thankless offspring. Initially Young Red was remarkably serene; though its calm demeanor is slowly being replaced by more typical nervous, look-before-you-leap behavior.

Young Red became an early devotee of the suet feeder outside my window. The first few times it came, it looked around dreamily. I can only assume it was overwhelmed then by the big bright, variegated world that confronted it when it emerged from the sensory deprivation of a hollow tree trunk. Baby Red is still quiet (unlike noisy Baby Hairy), though when it lands on the hemlock branch near the suet feeder now, it bobs its dun-colored head like an actor taking deep bows following a command performance. Still bowing and scraping, it advances down what I have come to think of as the landing strip, a branch that frequent bird landings have worn the finish off of; it’s as scarred as a busy airport runway.

Once it has drawn to within a foot of the feeder, Baby Red pauses, bobs and weaves a few more times, then slowly topples toward the feeder like a boy holding his nose and letting himself fall into a swimming pool. I suspect the toppling somehow induces its feet to unclench, because it’s followed by a little flurry. Next thing you know, Baby Red is hanging from the feeder, gorging itself.

That’s one of my favorite (for the present) HEC tapes, as fresh the 100th time I watch it as the first.

Because juvenile red-bellieds make their debuts in unisex plumage, I don’t know whether Young Red (who doesn’t have a speck of red anywhere and apparently won’t for several months) is male or female. Like “The Thorn Birds,” “The Red-Bellieds” is an unfolding, multi-episode drama.