There are things happening in this world around us that are very emotionally inconvenient to witness.
For example, you are in high school and see a little old lady trip and fall in front of the movie theater, howling for someone to help, while some G-Unit clad brats point and laugh at her.
Or how about when coming to a stop at an intersection, you look over and see a skunk with a Yoplait yogurt cup stuck on its head, blindly weaving in and out of cars driven by dead-inside beach people who look the other way or again, just laugh?
Then there was the time, when cleaning your fishbowl, you accidentally dumped your just-so-happened-to-be-dying-anyway beta fish down into the garbage disposal. (Please don't ever ask me what happened after that.)
If you are human, you feel a sense of responsibility at times like these. Sometimes you do something. Sometimes, unfortunately, you do nothing. In the end, you wish you had never seen it at all.
Such was the case last night. I was almost in the house, dammit. A hot hand on the doorknob, when I look down at my feet and see the rapidly puffing up and down, featherless chest of a baby bird, stuck on its back.
"Noooooo," I say. I hear my dog, with an extreme case of separation anxiety, going ballistic in the kitchen. I watch the, to be honest with you- ugly, little bird wildly kick and move its bald little head from side-to-side. There it is, I think. I'm in. F*CK!
After frantically phoning
Jen and Juan (who both give me very helpful but apparently not helpful enough Google-acquired-advice), it's just me and the bird. I don't see a nest either. I flip it over so that it starts hobbling around on what look like broken claw feet. I then come to the conclusion that I should put it in a small box.
The Hungarian mechanic who lives upstairs comes outside. He goes soft when I tell him what's going on. We decide to try and feed it with an oral syringe and tweezers, both of which I happen to have on hand. We both know this will probably do nothing. We both know this bird is going to die but even knowing this, we must still go through the motions of trying to save it. The mechanic holds the tiny head-bobbing body of the bird in his large, greasy fingernailed hand. He pinches both sides of its beak with his thumb and index finger.
"Open your mouth," he coos. "C'mon little bird, open your mouth." He keeps saying this over and over. I get caught up in the weirdness of watching this man's dirty hands, usually elbow- deep in the guts of an old Porsche each time I see him, cradling this delicate little creature. This goes on for a long time. We both keep looking at each other, hoping the other will admit defeat.
The bird finally drinks some water... a lot of water. Jen tells me to put it on something high so its mother can see it. We decide the balcony is a good spot after we realize some birds are nesting in a hole in the roof. There is a loose agreement to come back in two hours to see if it has in fact been rescued by its kin. This, of course, is our "they all lived happily ever after" solution, which we know will not happen. But we still hope, nonetheless.
In the meantime, I call the Audubon Society. The pinched Minnesota drawl on the other end of the line tells me the bird will not be rescued by the others because it is too young. She tells me to drive it over. I am relieved that someone else can feel guilty about this now.
Not so fast.
When I go upstairs to get the box, I see the bird on its back, stiff legs in the air, Wylie Coyote style. By this time Juan is home and tells me he read giving baby birds water can drown them. I admit defeat and to the fact that we may have actually done more harm than good. This does not feel good.
The predictable "bird murderer" jokes start flying back and forth between Jen and Juan. I know they don't mean it. I laugh with them a bit but I still feel like a killer.
When I see the mechanic later in the evening he gives me a forced expression of sadness. He is on his cell phone but I mouth, "It died," to him. He silently shakes his head and mouths back, "I know."
I frown and know I won't tell him it was our fault.
I still like reading books and usually avoid the great debate as to whether or not reading things on the internet can actually qualify as being literate. Many a grad student thesis has been written on this subject. In fact, I too wrote a research paper on this tired old argument once, way back in '06.
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