I was 17 and invincible, learning that miracles came in the strangest of ways, 19 when I met a stolid boy who seldom cried, and 20 when I found a bird.
The boy was terse with words and hardly a boy at all, 22 and he had never bought flowers for a girl, until he grew to love me when I was still trying to make it as a writer; so blithe and almost pitifully credulous. He lived on a street named Carriage and had found a neglected baby bird no larger than the size of his own calloused palm, one afternoon in late June.
When I met the bird, I realized that it was much, much more than a mere bird attempting to defeat its slim chances of survival out of the nest. It was sweet and fragile and miraculously smart. The bird looked at me with small eyes, although it was against his natural inclination to trust such a large, dominate species. Still, he sat in the palm of my hand, eyes half closed and soft with languor.
We leafed through names that felt unfitting; maybe Roofus, maybe Henry. I’m sure we resembled new parents to a degree, beginning and learning and loving until something felt suitable.
We named him Atticus.
The boy wanted the bird to learn how to fly, to grow, to feed itself. Meanwhile, I smothered it until it fell asleep by my side, safe and stowed away. But we agreed that the bird couldn’t be confined to a barred cage if it were to stay with us. He would be taught how to fly before he left for good.
I left Carriage, the boy, and the bird, giving Atticus one last smothering kiss before I left to go back home. He gave me a chirp that had become familiar, loved even, and less agitating.
—I lost him and it’s all my fault.
The boy had taken the bird outside to teach him to fly and the bird had flown over the roof into the wooded area behind his house. I drove to Carriage, and for the first time since I was fifteen, said the only two prayers I knew and begged and bargained with God to bring the bird back home.
I searched for what felt like a perpetual stillness in time until I was mosquito-bitten, worn, and weary.
"Atticus! Atticus!" Still, I was blind to the black thicket and moiling in the summer night’s heat.
The screen door closed behind me and the boy sat silent on the living room couch. I sat on the opposite sofa, knees cradled in, and we did not speak until my latent animal-like sobs became apparent as a futile attempt to suppress the inevitable lachrymose.
The boy gestured for me to sit beside him and it wasn’t until he said--I know, I know, did I realize that he was crying, too. The boy, the stolid, stoic boy cried to me, cried for Atticus.
I went back to face the pessimistic thicket and whistled a tune that I hoped would be familiar to flightless Atticus. My lurid imagination became unruly and I thought about our beloved bird, unable to feed himself and unfamiliar to nightfall. Still I yelled "Atticus! Atticus!" in hope that he would somehow hear me and find his way back home, or achieve some sort of comfort knowing that I was close. He was a smart bird, and it was not the boy’s fault.
Morning, and I closed the screen door behind me in a final attempt to find Atticus. Though the boy and I both knew that the chapped whistling and sad cries to the unresponsive trees were inefficacious, neither of us said it aloud. We came back inside like dejected dogs, eyesight on the floor and bird-less.
At 9 a.m., the boy worked on studying tax laws and I leafed through some of my written work, neither of us speaking. If there is anything so spectacular, so surreal that I have experienced it is this: In that one, singular moment, the boy happened to look from his desk of messily spread tax sheets and see a bird, no larger than the size of his calloused palm, attempting to direct it’s flight to a nearby tree outside of the boy’s window. It was when I was 20 that I knew for certain that miracles came in the strangest of ways; it was when I found a bird.
It was Atticus.
