Robin54

When I was a freshman in college, I had one requirement to sustain a scholarship into the next year: write a one-page essay at the end of the year to illustrate how I had enriched my educational experience with the funding. In retrospect, I should have written about the classes I took, my great grades, and how much more I could study since I didn't have to get a job. That was the obvious no-brainer essay, but the obvious is not necessary to write about, since it's so, well, obvious. So I wrote about the baby bird my roommate's cat brought into our apartment during finals week. Let me explain.

People who have cats know that cats like to bring their providers presents, usually dead critters. . .mice, lizards, baby bees. People who don't have cats probably don't for that very reason. But my roommate's cat had a habit of holding critters in his mouth in a way that kept them alive. At the beginning of finals week, he plopped a hatchling sparrow on the living room rug, looked up at us hunkered at the kitchen table, cramming for final exams, made a loud meowl, his way of saying "looky what I brought you." We lookied. From that moment, studying for finals became secondary to our round-the-clock feeding schedule for the sad little baby bird. It was in that ugly stage of infancy, when only a mother finds its baby adorable, all beak and bald wrinkled skin like an old man. It ate every two hours from a dropper. We would tap the side of its beak, the universal signal for myopic baby birds that mom has a worm or some barf to tamp into their gullets. Caring for the baby bird, I explained in my essay, gave me a renewed perspective on my schooling. Specifically, it made me realize that spending a year with my head buried in books had made me forget that life is happening, or struggling to happen, right outside my front door. I had decided, I wrote, that I needed to have more balance, study less, live more, that sort of thing. I sent off the essay, the bird died, and my scholarship was not renewed. Despite the outcome, I hung onto the idea that life is more than just getting more, more knowledge, more funding, more sleep. It's about giving.

On my recent trip north, I was reminded of the baby bird lesson, when a juvenile robin smashed into the big picture window of our cabin. At first it lay on the deck, too stunned to get up. I held it for a while and when it started looking more alert, I set it down. Often birds that hit windows will fly off after the initial shock wears off, but this one was clearly injured. My son, whose a fellow bird lover, and I got a box and kept it alive on droplets of water (since we didn't know what to feed him and couldn't google it since we had no wifi) until it was time to go home. After a few phone calls, I found what I was searching for: the little old lady bird rescue network. As far as I know, there is a kindly old woman in every community who takes in injured birds and nurses them back to health. We drove the bird to Wilma's house on our way back home. Wilma was probably in her eighties. She carefully placed the bird in a cage and made notes in a spiral notebook by her front door. Our bird was now Robin54, her 54th bird in 2010. I didn't have as strong a life-changing response to nursing this bird for two days, as I did when I was younger, in that I won't be quitting my job and embarking on a three month back-packing tour of Europe like I did after my freshman year, but I was reminded of the effect of caring for others and of the opportunity to pass this sense onto my children.