On a wall in the foyer of one of the houses my family lived in while I was growing up, in a town none of us can be found in anymore, though now and then one of us might visit, or happen to pass through it, my parents hung a painting of a landscape in which there appeared to be, on a branch of one of the trees, on a hillside that, to the viewer, seemed very far away, a bird that was doing nothing but sitting there, waiting, or watching whatever there was to watch, though of course there was no bird, or even any tree, but only brushstrokes that gave the illusion of such.