Emerging

On a rainy spring afternoon in the late 70's we pulled out Country Squire wood paneled station wagon into the parking lot of Sherwood Court apartments. About to dash down to give Gran-Gran a hug and get our dose of Tab soda out of the 1-liter glass bottle, my sisters and I stopped in our tracks.... there by the curb about to be washed down the drain pipe was a baby bird.... not the cute fuzzy kind that chirps asking for a worm, but a partially formed one... a robin with a little round head and long skinny neck emerging from a baby blue shell with eyes reminding me of purple peas and a beak the color of early morning sunshine. It was beautiful... what a find.

My mother, being the adventurous curious type scooped it up in a tissue. She took that little bird home and placed it in a glass Gerber baby food jar and filled the remaining space with rubbing alcohol. It sat on our breakfast room shelf amongst Mom's other trinkets of great value- or potential great value.... rubbery figurines of the Campbell's Soup Kids, the Jolly Green Giant, and the Morton Salt Girl. From that day forward we had the coolest Show and Tell item any girl could ever ask for.

I think this is what started my fascination with birds.

What is interesting in hindsight is the fact that the bird was starting to form- it was on its way to perfection- to being the bird God had created it to be when some circumstance stopped it and caused it to forever remain emerging, but never fully developed. It would be forever trapped in that little glass jar with the blue lid floating in a foreign substance and gawked over by hundreds of school kids.

I loved that little bird and I still treasure the memory of it and the impact it had on me and how I view nature and more specifically birds. So I have to ask myself if the bird was not fully developed for a reason... maybe it was developed into what God intended it to be... a lesson?

God made birds with wings to fly yet this bird never made it completely out of its shell. Is this how we are made? As a human was I made with an inner being and given a specific soul and then my circumstances stopped me short of discovering the joy and completeness of finding the voice of that soul and the essence of that being? Do some of us develop partially and for some reason or another that is enough because that is where we need to be for others around us?

I can't help but think that the bird was dead.... the bird was dead as well as trapped yet it lit up so many eyes of those that stared at it through the murky alcohol forever leaving an impression.