Little Wing

It's Father's Day.

My father and I have a difficult relationship. We're not close. There are situations where an excellent memory is a blessing, but it is often true that it can also be a curse.

For Father's Day, though, a story: Once, when I was a girl (and that very phrase makes me marvel -- when did I get so old as to be able to begin in such a way?) I was walking in the narrow hall that lead from our kitchen to the bedrooms when I heard a shrill, distressed peeping. I went into the bedroom my parents shared and there, in the window, was a small bird. It clung to the window screen. Behind it, two larger birds answered its cries, swooping at intervals from the pine trees in our side yard.

I could tell something was wrong. I ran for my parents. "There's a baby bird caught in your window screen!"

My parents and my sister came to see. The baby bird seemed unable -- or unwilling -- to release its hold on the mesh, as though it had been trying to fly, had failed somehow in the lesson, and was now too afraid to let go, despite the frantic calls of the other birds that I imagined were the parents.

"Stay in the house," my dad said.

He went to the basement and got a heavy pair of work gloves, then went outside and took the tiny, trembling body into his hand and, as gently as possible, worked the fledgling's talons free from the screen. All the while, the larger birds both scolded him at the top of their birdy lungs -- and, in an effort to protect their young -- hurled themselves at his head. He didn't swat at them or let go of the baby bird. He simply kept at his task until it was free; when it finally was, he opened his hand and off it flew. My sister and I clapped with joy.

We spent the whole summer RUNNING out of the house, because whenever we went outside, the birds attacked us. There was no room for gratitude in their feathery brains; they didn't see my dad as the human who rescued their baby, but as the giant who had traumatized their entire family beyond belief.

I never minded dashing from the house to the car, though, or the fact that suddenly going to the end of the driveway to get the mail was an event of Olympic and possibly fatal dimensions (I suspect that my mother, who fears birds and who had to hang the wash in the backyard to dry, had entirely different feelings about the fact that the birds wanted to maim us all), because I had seen a side of my father that I had never seen. He could be kind. He could be gentle.

I could whisper it to myself: My father saves birds.