This cardinal fledgling is taking on adult form and color. But will he fly right, on his own?
Funny how the little things add up some days, like eggs in a basket, eggs that soon may spoil.
Yesterday was one such day, bringing that kind of skein of phenomena we’re too busy usually to notice or to feel. But their coincidence struck me hard and balled me up too.
In the evening my wife Jen and I were driving to St. Paul to meet our son Gabe and his family for dinner. We’d hardly started out when we came upon, in the middle of a busy intersection, a male cardinal and one of his brood. It was just a flash of red, Big Red as I call the male bird, descending suddenly on a dubious pile of fluffy feathers. It was a traffic light that had just turned green, the roaring of vehicles out of the starting gate once more, and the sight of the Red Bird vainly trying to pick up his chick and fly away with it from danger. He plunged down, plucked at the fledgling, and rose up only to lose his load. The fledgling, motionless already or nearly so, dropped down, and we sped on, ignorant of the fate of the fledgling, who may have been on his first flight and, failing to rise, hit a car, or of the father bird for that matter. We sped on, as who in his right mind would stop and pluck a half-live, half-dead fledging out of the busy road at rush hour?
Dinner was fine, fun, at a St. Paul deli called the Cheeky Monkey. Jen and I, Gabe and Heidi and Ruby, and my sister Jeannie chowed down on wonderful sandwiches, cum and sans meat. I tried the cubano, which was prepared as a salad (option on all sandwiches), loaded with meat and wonderful greens. Ruby, our almost 3 year old granddaughter, ate pretty well off our plates and behaved nicely, a good challenge for one and a half hours. But when we left the restaurant she darted away from us on the sidewalk directly in front of the parking lot exit. We all simultaneously yelled at her — just as another customer’s SUV approached the drive. He slammed on his brakes, and we all breathed in alarmed relief. Too close a call for our little fledgling. We scolded her, and she took it all in solemnly a moment, then gave us the raspberry.
Later in the evening, back at home, Jeannie was telling me about a new trend in yoga, which she practices enthusiastically, religiously. It was something about using yoga to companion the sick. Dubious and skeptical as always, I scoffed — at the language and yoga, too, it must have been. This scoff was produced automatically, a real knee-jerk (throat-jerk) response. To companion a sick person? What nonsense! Jeannie teaches college English, as I have done, and I thought she should be more sensitive to this awful jargon. I huffed and puffed and if I didn’t blow the house down I made it haughtily clear, in short order, that sick people were not to be companioned!
(I find, in doing a quick Google search, that this idiom has indeed caught on in the health care field. Here’s the title of an article I’m sure you won’t rush out to read any time soon: “Decreasing Companion Usage without Negatively Affecting Patient Outcomes: A Performance Improvement Project.” Oh, shudder, shudder. We purists of the language, we high priests of usage simply shudder.)
But however I feel about such jargon, what was telling was my quick, rude reaction, cutting off my sister before she could make her point. She is attached to yoga, as I say, the way people are attached to religion. And it seems to have done her good, judging by her lean and healthy look. But I wasn’t having any of it, rude dog that I am. I preferred to assert my own opinion rather than listen to another’s. I swooped down on my sister the way the traffic swooped down on that little bird, and who would rescue her or care to stop?
