katbird

      I don’t know where I learned it, maybe in an episode of This American Life, but somewhere I heard that if a bird flies into your home, it symbolizes a soul.
     “So what does it mean if you bring the bird into your house yourself?” Katerina asked. I wasn't really sure.
This bird was flightless with a crooked right wing, a little yellow and black thing, so small you could crush it between your fingers. It was waiting to die outside our building, so Katerina just scooped the creature up and brought him inside. We made a nest out of an old box and some newspaper, filled a bowl with water and birdseed and watched to see what would happen.

     It’s interesting how such a tiny little animal can fill a house so completely. For a whole week this summer, Katerina fussed over him like a mother hen. She followed a careful distance behind while he hopped around the corners of the apartment. She went to the store and brought him back live crickets, then worried that he wouldn’t be able to catch them, she killed them by hand and placed them in his food bowl. He was a wild bird. I mean, he looked like a wild bird. But somehow he felt perfectly safe perched on her finger. At dawn, when he was tired of sleeping, he woke Kat up by jumping up and down on her shoulder. In the mornings we found her a bleary-eyed mother asleep on the couch in the living room so that the bird could hop all he wanted in her bedroom without waking anyone up.

     She worried over him, taping up his injured wing, an activity much like trying to tie a splint to a blade of grass. She protected him from Marlow’s predatory urges since our sweet, often skittish scaredycat had changed into a fearless hunter, pacing back and forth outside Katerina’s door, and she had a time of it, hiding the bird or the cat in various bedrooms or physically wrenching Marlow away when he took a swing at the little thing. The bird would invariably hop his way into some corner or get lost under somebody’s bed, so Kat had to crouch on the floor and move aside furniture and dusty shoes to find him.

     She found the whole experience so exhausting that at one point she drove all the way to south Brooklyn to drop him off at an animal shelter, only to be told that the shelter had a policy of euthanizing wild birds. So she gathered him in her palms and drove him all the way back home to north Brooklyn and reinstated him in the shoebox in her bedroom.

     We were three roommates, a cat and a bird. The house was full. And after the sad, empty silences of that long last year, I was grateful for it. We named him Milton and he provided many, many quotes of the day. Everything was funny when it had the word “bird” in it.

     But then. Well…. One afternoon, Katerina peeked into the box and found Milton slumped over, his whole left side paralyzed. We put him on the sunny spot on the window ledge while Kat called vet after vet, trying to find someone, anyone, who would take a wild bird. And then while she was on hold with the tenth veterinary clinic, we watched, watched his tiny little bird soul leave his body. Wooosh.


     First there was silence. Then I went straight into denial, “I think he’s still alive.” He was still so bright and beautiful. “Did he just breathe?” Kat went into her room and closed the door.

     Later that day, we held the burial. We made little shovels out of empty tin cans and found a corner in Mccaren Park to bury him, a vibrant streak of yellow feathers against the brown earth.

     “Do you want to say a word?” I asked Kat once the deed had been done.
     “The bird’s the word,” Kat said. And that was the quote of the day.

photo by Kat.
Milton.
Summer 2009.
May he rest in peace.