Writers and other artists can be seen as eccentric. You know, like Agatha Christie who wrote in the bathtub? Or James Whitcomb Riley, who wrote naked to resist the temptation to walk to the bar? Better yet, Oscar Wilde who was known to walk a lobster down the street on a leash.

Now imagine 10,000 writers all gathered in the same place. That’s where I was last week.

It was the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference in Baltimore, with more than 10,000 writers, publishers, writing programs, and agents swarming one another. Awesome people-watching!

One day, perched on a top stair overlooking the main lobby, I became transfixed on a young woman’s knee-length hair. I never saw her from the front, only the back. Her dark hair was perfectly straight, with dyed horizontal blond stripes spaced perfectly so that it looked like a ring-tailed lemur or raccoon.

Honestly, there were plenty of people who simply blended into the crowd with an unremarkable appearances, but eccentricity, flair, and just plain oddity were well-represented. It reminded me of the ducks on Seneca Lake.

Truthfully, I spend a lot more time ogling gulls and birds of prey down at the lake than ducks. But Rabia, who rarely takes notice of a bird in the air, gets curious about ducks bobbing around on the waves — or on a calm day, drifting with genteel V-shaped ripples in their wake.

Ducks have such fantastic fashions! Like the Greater Scaup with its green head and bright yellow eyes sticking out on both sides. They’re not to be mistaken for the Common Goldeneye, whose green head is triangular with a big yellow eye. Then there is the garish Bufflehead with its maroonish neck and bright green face, but sporting a scarf of intense white feathers draped from ear to ear between the other colors. The Common Merganser is more eccentric than common. It has a green head, bright orange bill, and otherwise white body. The Redhead duck is what it sounds like: a body covered with muted brown and black feathers sporting a burnt orange head.

Well, you get the idea. They are quite the society of peculiar fashions. And really, that isn’t the half of it. There are the Mallards, Northern Pintails, American Black Ducks, Green-winged Teals, American Wigeons, Canvasbacks, and Wood Ducks that also strut their stuff down at the lake. Eccentrics all.

The ducks and writers got me thinking about how angry, punitive, and belligerent we are as a society with regard to our differences. Woke and MAGA, pierced and gun-racked, huipiles and hoops or Redwings and flat caps — somehow we can’t just marvel and enjoy the eccentricities and marked differences between us.

All those varieties of ducks seem to comfortably swim in close proximity to one another, sometimes even getting all mixed up. People? Not so much.

Driving home I was grateful for the reminder that this small dot on the map is not the world, and that the way I dress or eat or think is not a norm against which eccentricity is measured.

Gratitude also warmed my heart when, cresting that hill on Route 14 South just before Dresden, an intensely blue velvet lake was spreading out beneath a cloudless blue sky. It may not be the world, but this little dot on the map is amazing.

Cameron Miller is a New York author with two novels and two collections of essays and poetry available in bookstores and online. Read more and reach him at www.cameronmiller.org.

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