“O LORD Almighty,
blessed is the man who trusts in you.” Psalm 84:12
We first
spotted the nest when a robin flew up so close to our window that it
was startling. Up high off the
ground, that nest was in no danger from neighborhood cats, it seemed, securely
constructed in the crotch of a substantial branch of an ornamental crab just
off our deck. When I pointed it out, my wife had the same thought I did—how great it would be to show our
grandchildren.
Soon
enough there were babies. Before
Memorial Day already you couldn’t miss them, rustling around whenever mom would
alight, thrusting up those thin yellow beaks as if their only job was to eat—which
it was. Soon enough, you could hear
them, their chirp slightly higher, more unrestrained than their mother’s, often
frantic.
On
Memorial Day one fell. A gray-brown
smudge of feathers simply dropped out of the nest, bounced off a smaller branch
on an untoward descent, then plopped to the ground. There she was—or he—the kid anyway or one of
them, speckled and unkempt and quite unready for the terrors beneath, crying like
a baby, which, of course, he was—or she. That song wasn’t lament, but sheer terror. She’d lost her place.
It must
be horrifying, traumatizing, for the rest of the whole bunch. With as many robins as
there are in the neighborhood, some red-breasted shrink has to have set out a
shingle, I thought. Calls for grief counseling for sure.
I wasn’t
about to put her back. We were sitting
on the deck, reading, and occasionally watching her helicopter mom, who
wouldn’t let her alone.
Then,
suddenly, a melee of frantic chirping. Had to be
a cat around. I got out of my chair, stepped
off the porch and into the evergreens, and sure enough, a mangy tailless tabby
took off towards the garage. That baby
robin was safe.
Tuesday, on
my bike, right in front of the neighbor’s house, on my way to school, I had to
swerve to avoid hitting a baby robin on the pavement, flat as a paper doll. Car got him—or her. No cat.
I shrugged my shoulders. I’d watched
that mother nurture her child for weeks just off our deck. That child had been her life, and now the cause of her life was no more.
But even now, as
I type these words, a baby robin’s high-pitched trill is starting the morning just
outside my window because although some mother’s baby didn’t make it, someone
else’s has. Maybe it’s the one we
watched grow.
Most of that story escaped my grandchildren, and that's fine because because they’re far too young
for sadness. That flattened baby robin
would have done my granddaughter in, I’m sure. She remembered last Memorial Day only because, on a bike trip, we saw a
dead squirrel—“with blood on it”—on the road, she said. I’d forgotten completely until she
mentioned it again because she hadn't.
Such is
life. Our maples dump several hundred
thousand whirlybird seeds every spring.
If I and my mower have anything to say about it, not one of them will
make it.
Such is
life. There are great stories, inside and
outside the nest—how a tabby high-tailed it out of the neighborhood, how a hungry
stomach got a meal, how a robin’s song delights the dawn. Such is life
But some
dreams never become anything but and eventually fade. Of course, finally all babies die.
The heart of this beauty-of-a-psalm, Psalm 84, is this last verse--"blessed is the man who trusts in you." Through all the perils, all the dangers, all
the grief, in those moments when we’re so blasted far from the nest that we nearly
despair ever finding our way back or escaping danger sufficient to end it all,
those who continue to trust, those who won’t forget God or let him forget
them, those trusting, fallen children, even if they fall silent, can and will somehow keep on singing.
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