I want to share a little story about something that happened last evening – but it involves a young friend of ours whose name should probably be kept out of it. (I would hate for her to feel the least bit embarrassed by what I’m about to share.) So let me call her B and leave it at that.
Kathy and I were relaxing at home yesterday evening when the phone rang – and it was our young friend B, who was home by herself. (Her parents were out of town, and we were at the top of her list of people to call if any sort of problems or questions came up.) She called us because she had just heard a big strange thump in the living room, and when we went in to see what in the world was going on, she found that a bird had crashed into their patio sliding door and was lying on the stoop, apparently dead. We could hear their golden retriever barking in the background, tremendously upset and/or excited by this – and B was wondering how in the world she was going to ever be able to let out their dog with this dead bird lying right there. But she couldn’t imagine going anywhere near this little corpse. So she did the only thing she could think of – she called Kathy and me. Kathy was so sweet on the phone, reassuring her that it was okay that she had called (she must have been apologizing left and right) and just being so sweet and comforting. (That’s one of my wife’s most distinctive gifts.) Actually, if this had happened over here at our house, Kathy would have had to send out a similar call for assistance. . . that is , once she had recovered from fainting.
Needless to say, it was I who was dispatched to B’s house, and I went well equipped- with my handy dandy dog poop scooper and a plastic bag. . . and sure enough, there was a dead bird laying on their patio stoop – – – actually what appeared to my amateur eye to be a purple finch. And their golden retriever was still transfixed by the sight and barking his head off- and this is a good ten minutes after the bird’s ill-fated collision with the glass. That’s a long time for a dog to bark frantically at a stone-still corpse, but that’s how worked up he was, which I’m sure contributed to how upset our young friend was. And it was a sad sight.
I set to work, scooping up the little thing and dropping it into my bag- – – and I noticed after picking it up that there was a bit of blood on the cement, which indicates just how violent a collision this was. (At least it was an instant death.) Once safely scooped up, the bird’s body was deposited in one of the garbage cans in the garage . . . at which point B began thanking me as though I had just offered to pay for her entire college education. I told her that I was glad that she had felt like she could call us with such a problem, knowing full well that we would do whatever we could to help.
As I was scooping up that little corpse, the strangest thought flew through my head: this is the kind of thing that dads do. (and some moms, too, of course.) I immediately thought back to something I remember my dad telling me about back in Atlantic, Iowa (where I went to high school). . . He was at a gas station (I think with my mom) when a little kitten wandering through the gas station was accidentally run over by another car and killed instantly. Apparently the young man working at this service station (this was back in the days when an employee was typically out at the pumps, assisting customers and perhaps even pumping the gas for them) saw what happened but simply could not bring himself to go near the little corpse- so my dad did it for him- scooping up the little thing and then finding a place to put it. This was well after the days when I thought my dad walked on water, but this was one of those moments when I thought to myself “he is made of much stronger stuff than I am.” But here I was, all these years later, essentially doing the same sort of thing – – – and either last summer or the summer before, I had the unpleasant but necessary task of removing the corpse of a cat that had died in our yard. (Kathy spotted its body beneath the overhang of our east outside wall.) There are not all that many moments in my life when I feel like the proverbial He-Man . . . especially since I’m married to an amazing woman who could probably disassemble our washing machine and rebuild it into a nuclear submarine with a pair of pliers and some twine. I am asked to open the occasional pickle jar for her, but mostly I’m rather inept at most stuff around the house. But when it’s time to remove a corpse or kill a big spider, I suddenly feel like I have an S on my chest. . . standing not for “super” but rather “somehow I’ll get the job done.”
pictured: B actually took this picture for me- That’s her golden retriever in the foreground and the bird in the background.