Death Watch for a Baby Sparrow

Last nite, Scott and I are in bed watching The Grapes of Wrath (1940) with Henry Fonda, the sad but ultimately triumphant saga of a group of dirt-poor tenant farmers in Oklahoma who arrive with thousands of other poor Oklahomans to California where they erroneously believe work and wages will be available to them.

Fonda and Ma, brilliantly played by Jane Darwell, deliver some stirring lines - ooh! I'm getting goose bumps now as I remember them - about the will of their people - just regular people - who will always survive, for they are the only ones who know the true meaning of life, of hard work, of family, of song and of love. These were amazing admirable people.

As darkness fell here in Willow Grove, PA, Scott and I were both thinking of our little sparrow who had been torn from his nest and who now lived alone in a borrowed nest right outside my family room, where my bed is, making not a sound, while all about him sparrows chattered away.

Scott mentioned he thought of euthanizing the bird but that he hadn't the nerve. Oh, you mustn't do that, I said, what'll the other birds think.

Somehow messages are conveyed among birds. We didn't wanna disturb the laws of nature. I mentioned to Scott that he had permission to euthanize ME if the time ever came.

I briefly thought about religions that promulgate life after death, which, I spose, is most of em. Shouldn't there be an afterlife for sparrows too? Shouldn't he be greeted by a huge loving sparrow mama who will fold the little guy in her arms and say, There there! We were with you in your struggles, my darling, and now you've come home.

Before it was terribly dark, Scott put on his slippers and went out to the shrub where he'd placed the robin's nest with the sparrow in it.

He's stopped breathing, Scott said.

I marveled how quickly the bird had passed from his quick breaths to no visible breathing. What caused his rapid decline? Sure, he was traumatized landing on my bedroom floor among all my fallen pens and a copy of my yellow booklet on how I recovered from bipolar disorder. And then when we shooed him into the dust-bin and deposited him in the robin's nest.

Earlier that day my darling son Dan was over doing some computer stuff for me. I showed him the new & improved back porch and he noticed the unused robin's nest on the table.

He paused a moment, my son, who is taller than me and has the blue eyes of his dad, and he ran his hands around the robin's nest exclaiming, "This is really amazing, Mom. And look how they know to put the soft material on the bottom." We marveled at how sturdy it was even tho it had blown out of a tree. "Do they use glue?" he wondered aloud.

This morning Scott checked on the nest. The rain had tilted it in the shrub. The bird, he reported, was dead. We'll move it later to a soft spot in the backyard where nature will decide what use to put it to next.