Elegy For Singing Bird

I walk east toward the lake on Belmont Avenue, on the south-side of the street where quaint houses meet dank alleys and two churches are stuffed between each side of the street.

As I make my way up the street on the side of the smaller church, there on the sidewalk lay a wounded grackle. It looks as though one of its wings has been injured or perhaps its leg was broken, but I’m not too sure, as I stare down at it in bewilderment.

I decide not to touch it for fear of being bitten, so I stand there frozen just looking at it, until a Welsh-speaking man stops beside me and asks me what the trouble is.

As I point it out, we both are sad-faced and beyond belief. The two of us watch as the bird helplessly struggles and spins itself around, until finally it is able to stand on its own two legs briefly, but falls back to the ground.

Shortly thereafter, the Welshman and I decide to take the bird and gently push it onto a piece of cardboard, hoping that it will be able to gain flight in mid-air and find its way to a safer ground.

1-2-3 and whoosh! Off the grackle flew…for five seconds and then crash-landed into the middle of Belmont Avenue. At that point we knew full well that the bird was doomed.

Perhaps one of the more pathetic moments was all the people passing us by on the sidewalk not bothering to stop and help as if we and the wounded bird never existed.

Strangely enough, however was the sympathetic action of the drivers who saw the wounded bird and swerved to avoid hitting it. This included a CTA bus. Yet as immense as a beautiful gesture like that was, it also broke both of our hearts.

“I can’t watch this,” said the Welsh-speaking man, as he walked away from the scene and disappeared into a building a few doors away.

In a moment of kindness, we do what we think is best, but perhaps it’s not really that way at all. As I made my way up Belmont Avenue and then onto Broadway, I thought about the bird, hoping upon hope that it would make it through its last breathing moments.

Later that night as the rains fell into my hair and slipped into my eyes as I walked west onto Belmont Avenue from Broadway, I looked toward that same spot that I was at nearly two hours earlier, I saw the pile of feathers and crushed body…and I knew right away that as much as life gives us pleasure, it also takes it away from us in a most dramatic fashion.

I knew that night that the soul of the grackle was in a much better place than its crummy beginnings here on this Earth.