Now, every seven or eight minutes, during the daylight hours, a loud and unfamiliar dose of birdsong overwhelms the block for about forty seconds: wailing, whistling, screeching; one distinctly unpigeon-like call after the next, in rapid succession.
As Santiago changed the diaper on her 10-month-old infant and tried to quiet a second wailing baby, her 8-year-old daughter, Teresa, bounced on the bed and chanted: "I want to go to school.
"I wish you were special," Prince sang, changing Thom Yorke's first-person wail into a second-person embrace.
The first otherworldly wail shot the remaining four cats through the screen and into the house.
After the first birth wail, infants' cries will be mostly cries of desperate discharge, signaling discomfort.
Trapped, I listen helplessly throughout Henry's first wave of wails, lost in a half-sleep that, for 18 months, I'd persuaded myself was all the sleep I needed.
"Today is Friday the thirteenth!" she wailed.
For sixty seconds, sirens wailed across Istanbul, ferry horns resounded along the Bosphorus, and traffic stopped in front of Dolmabahçe Palace, the one-time home of the sultans.
