For the Birds.

Father G. was talking about the time when we used to raise canaries. And I don’t remember the whole situation but he attempted something and one died. And he didn’t know what to do to save it from dying before it did. Isn’t that the way things work sometimes. One lives, another dies? And who are we to say why? You ever try to take a rosebud and make it become a full rose by helping it out? Sometimes helping out fails despite our best efforts. And yet you saw the struggle and did something.

Maybe you didn’t have enough knowledge to bring back life to the bird. So with your story you might have gotten the wrong message from the experience. What else could it mean? I remember seeing a pigeon dying. To me it was more sad than watching a person die. Absolutely nothing I could do about it except watch and even that felt hopeless and fruitless.

It’s eyes kept on opening and closing and you could see the struggle that it was having. Wondering what if any future reality it thought that it might have. So my knowledge was in vain in this area. Worthless. Where does a God loving bird go when they die? And how does a bird sin?

So on an extremely cold day, I walked out of my friend’s apartment and was on my way to the train station. Briefly I noticed the birds on the branches of a tree without leaves and they were just good little dinosaurs behaving if nothing had changed.