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April 02, 2005

some days you're the bird, some days you're the grille

So walking back from the bank we spot somebody trying to park a car next to the curb, in front of Victoria's Secret. A Mercedes, a sporty little green thing, driven by a sporty little not-green-at-all woman. And in the front grille of that pretty little car is the poor, mangled body of a bird. I'm not sure what kind of bird it is, it's mostly mashed ... what I can see (the unmashed part) is gray. One outstretched wing and a bit of its body.

I wonder if maybe it was a robin. A harbinger of spring, cruelly cut down right at spring's beginning. Maybe it was in the road picking up a twig to build its nest. Yikes.

The driver must have seen our horrified looks, but we kept walking. After she got out of her car, I wonder what she did. Probably went around to the front to see what we had been gaping and pointing at... and then what did she do? Scream? Get a stick and pry the bird off her car? Just keep driving around for the rest of the day with a dead robin in the grille? Call her husband and make him wash it off when she got home?

I wonder how the bird got to be stuck in the car's grille. Seeing that bird makes me remember: flying down a hill in San Francisco in a rented car on our way to the airport. Early Sunday morning, no traffic, every light is ours. Whee. And at the bottom of the hill in front of the last light before getting on to the 101 is a flock of pigeons standing in the middle of the road.

We're late for the airport. I don't slow down. "Watch out!" you say, and I say "They'll get out of the way, don't worry." And they do get out of the way, except for one pigeon, which thumps on the hood and then thumps on the windshield. Thump. There's bird-dust on the glass and a few feathers are stuck in the wipers. I've killed it. I ran down a pigeon because I was late and it was in the way. It's horrible, and we laugh, horrified. But life goes on: we get on the freeway, drive to the airport, we catch our plane and fly back to Connecticut.

The next month my mother dies and I get pregnant with Herself. And the only time I ever think about that bird is when you tell the story of how I ran over a bunch of pigeons in San Francisco. Until today.

Posted by JudyLa at 06:00 AM | Comments (0)