“O LORD Almighty,
blessed are those who trust in you.” Psalm 84
We first
spotted the nest when a robin flew up into it, so close to our window that it
was almost 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 to
my wife, she 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. 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 bunch. With as many robins as
there are in the neighborhood, some red-breasted shrink has to have set out a
shingle, I thought.
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 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.
Honestly,
I shrugged my shoulders. I’d watched
that mother nurture her child for weeks.
That child had been her life, and now the cause of her life was no more.
But even as
I type these words, a baby robin’s high-pitched song is starting the morning
just outside my window because even though some mother’s baby didn’t make it, someone
else’s has. Maybe it’s the one we
watched grow.
I’m just
happy most of that story escaped my grandchildren 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 until she
mentioned it again.
Such is
life. Our maples dumped several hundred
thousand whirlybird seeds this 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, in and
out 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.
But some
dreams get flattened, and eventually, of course, all the babies die.
The verifiable
soul of this beauty-of-a-psalm, Psalm 84, is this last verse. 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 at ever finding our way back or escaping danger sufficient to end it
all, those who can continue to trust, those who won’t forget God or let him
forget them, those trusting, fallen children, in faith, somehow keep singing.
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