Worms and Honey

3797 .

So,  I’m making dinner and drinking wine — A little too much wine — and listening to Charlie
Parker — There’s no such thing as too much Charlie Parker. ‘A Night in Tunisia’ I hear the car door slam. My wife. A little wobble in my step as I head to the mud room to let her in, help her with all her stuff. I reach for her big,  red bag, the one with all the kids’ work books. She’s a teacher.
“Oh! Look! A bird!” There it was, on the deck. Couldn’t have been more than a few days old. Featherless. It’s skin almost transparent.  Is this a baby bird? Or an x-ray of a baby bird?
“Happens all the time. Mama tosses them out of the nest” I shoot her a questionable glance.
“Why?”
“I don’t know . . . Nature?”
“Is that true? I mean . . . Could’ve been . . . I don’t know . . . It’s windy . . . Could’ve — Is that true?”
“All I know is what I see on Animal Plan — It’s still alive!” Sure enough, the little thing was moving . . . Barely.  It’s head was way too big and it’s neck way too skinny to support it. It was just sort of . . . Writhing in a sorry little heap.
I pick the pathetic creature up and carry it inside where I frantically look around for something to serve as a make shift bird hospital bed. A Styrofoam tray in the trash can catches my eye. My wife is nonplussed –  at once proud of my well intentions and resigned to my complete ineptitude.
“What are you doing?”
“I don’t . . . Know !” Of course, I don’t know what I doing. I’m not a vet — Or even one of those people who wash baby ducks with Dawn after an oil spill — “But we’ve got to do something!”
Out of desperation, I grab the honey off the counter — Honey mustard chicken, my wife’s favorite.  “Couldn’t hurt, right? I mean, it’s just sugar. No one ever died from eating sugar, right? I mean . . . Everything . . . Everything , sooner or later, turns into sugar. Right?
“It’s a bird, not a bee. Or a bear”
“Right. What do baby birds eat?
“What do birds eat?”
“Right! The Mama bird goes out and find berries and bugs and worms and . . . The regurgitation thing!”  I run outside, turn over one of the big pots in the garden and

Ssss . . . Mup!

A big wriggler, right out of its sss . . . mup hole!
I mash the thing up into a gooey mess, using a hastily grabbed spoon from the dish rack, and a dish. A half assed mortar and pestle.
“Robert! That’s our good . . .”
“C’mom, Jo! I’m in ER mode! We gotta to save Charlie!”
“Char — Oh,  the poor thing” She picked little Charlie up — His name was Charlie now, and he was a little boy bird — And gently stroked his head. “Do you think he’ll make it?”
“I don’t know” I took the flat end of a toothpick, dipped it into the awful worm gruel and held it up,  just above his head.  As if on cue,  Charlie’s beak springs wide open,  just like on Animal Planet.  I felt like a proud mama as I fed him from toothpick  ‘beak’. 
“Attaboy, Charlie!”
I wondered about his real mama and how she could have let this happen. I mean, she probably didn’t push little Chas out of the nest but . . . One mom to another? . . . None of my kids ever fell out of their bedroom windows onto the deck.
After he seemed to have his fill I picked up Charlie and his Styrofoam bed and made my way out onto the deck where I placed him on the table under the folding umbrella to rest up — Him and me both.
I sat down and looked out onto my garden, and up into the boughs of the trees just above.  The nest must be up there somewhere.
”Here. You look like you could use this, ‘Doctor’” We click our glasses and take our sips.  Dinner was simmering on the stove, Mozart was simmering on Alexa, wafting through the kitchen and spilling out onto the deck. She always changes the music when she comes home.
Every now and then I’d look down at the tray on the table and my charge. He didn’t look all that much different from the first time I saw him, but where there was once so much turmoil in this naked little waif’s life,  there now seemed to be . . . Tranquility? Peace? Big words for such a tiny and fragile creature but I could see a measure of . . . Even a bigger word in his little, goofy face. Hope?
Of course it was just transference — But then Charlie let out a long and contented yawn, like a spoiled fat cat sprawled out on its owner’s favorite easy chair.  And in that moment I dared to think that he just might make it.
 
He didn’t.

I don’t know if I helped the little guy or just killed him faster. Maybe I shouldn’t’ve got involved at all.  Charlie was a baby bird that got a bad break — Maybe two. The first was falling out of the nest. The second was falling onto the deck of a man drinking too much wine and making honey mustard chicken.

It was my wife’s idea. She saw how much the short life of this little bird had affected me. So the next day, we all, the whole family — She thought it important to involve the kids too — marched out to the honeysuckle tree in the back yard to officially say ‘good bye’ to my newest old friend. ‘A Night in Tunisia’  makes for a . . . unique funerial processional but I simply could not fathom any other.
Charlie looked so peaceful, laid out in his oven match matchbox. Truly peaceful. No transference there.
“What’s that,  Daddy?”  A sound in the distance, a steady, whirring sound. They say an approaching tornado sounds like a freight train. This wasn’t a train — Well, neither is a tornado — This was an ear piercing, shrill . . . Like a million penny whistles in the sky and heading our way.
“I don’t know,  Honey.  Sounds like . . .”
“Birds,  Dad.  Sounds like . . . birds” She was right. A great, cackling cacophony of birds, and it was swelling, growing louder and louder. And then we saw them — Hundreds — Thousands — Millions? Birds filling the sky, blocking the sun.
“Daddy,  I’m scared”
“It’s okay,  Baby.  It’s okay” Hollow words of comfort. I mean, these were Charlie’s peeps. What did they think of me? And who can ever know what’s on a bird’s mind — Or a million birds’ minds. And then as of one mind, the birds starting swirling . . . Swirling . . . A feathery dome winding round and round . . . Slowly descending . . . Down and down . . .
The sky cleared.  The trees and bushes were encrusted.  The wires.  The rooftops — Any and every place there was to light,  birds were lighting, and singing and clicking and clucking and chirping — Sounding their bird voices,  right along with another ‘bird’, the ‘Yardbird’ himself,  sounding his magnificent voice through a hot and sweaty, bent and tarnished, twisted brass bill.
I knelt down,  lowered little Charlie into the ground, dropped the ‘casket’ into what was little more than a glorified divot, rose, and gave a nod to my son to push the button on the little boom box.  The music stopped, and then all the music — The entire chorus, up in the trees and on the wires and the rooftops and in the bushes and every place there was to light — All the singing, all the clicking, all the clucking, all the chirping and whirring, all the birds’ voices . . .

Silence.

My wife, noticing the growing look of concern on the kids’ faces, gives me a little elbow jab, as if to
say  ‘Hey, Babe. You want to wrap this thing up?’ Her eyes fixed on the back door. I straighten up, clear my throat and . . .
“Charlie, I remember the first time we met. Like it was yesterday” She rolls her eyes.
“It was yesterday!”
“Right! Right. It was indeed, only yesterday, but though our time together was short . . . ”  I really should have written something down. “. . . Short . . . And . . . You never got the chance to grow up, or get your feathers, or even open your eyes . . . See the world from a bird’s eye view — Fly. But in my mind, in my heart, you’re up there . . . In the clouds . . . Soaring . . . Like . . . ‘The Bird’  himself” Another elbow.
“Okay, Rev. Nice service!  Now, shall we all get the hell back inside?”
We started slowly, deliberately, walking back to the deck, looking like the family at the end of Hitchcock’s ‘The Birds’. And just as I reach for the handle of the sliding doors I feel my heels being sucked out of my . . . Heels! Every and any place there was to light — Un lighted! The trees and bushes. The wires and rooftops. All in one mighty . . . Ssss . . . Mup! A tornado of feathers stirred . . . And . . .
Spun . . . And churned on its way upward and out of my back yard. The whirring, the singing and clucking and clicking and chirping — All the birds’ voices were back, and rose higher and higher, filling our ears and the sky, billowing, blocking the sun again before evanescing, like a dream or a memory.

I never really thought I’d ever see Charlie squawking and strutting around his Styrofoam tray like some tiny gangsta Jaybird . . . Or whatever kind of bird he was. Deep down, I knew that image I had of me triumphantly,  releasing him one afternoon in the back yard to the strains of the ‘Flying High Now!’ was just wishful thinking . . . Lining up preschools . . . And prospective colleges . . . It’s a mom thing.
Whether it was his mother or an ill wind,  Little Charlie didn’t have a chance in this world. If I didn’t kill him,  the neighbor’s cat certainly would’ve. The sobering truth is . . . Mother Nature is a real mother!   She doesn’t give a second thought to shivering, featherless, baby birds that fall, or get pushed out of their nests.  And she doesn’t give anyone a second chance.

She gives us life.
And worms.
And honey.

*

O.B.