It’s not lost on me that the words are so similar. So often when painting the birds, I feel the smiling, winged “wink” from above.
He didn’t really know me, when he commissioned the painting for his wife. (Didn’t know that I have a “bird by bird” daily regime.) When I finished, he asked if I could add a little something special on the back. “Could you paint a bird in flight?” I looked around the open sky to see who was watching, “Yes,” I smiled, “I could paint a bird…”
I painted for her a yellow bird to match the yellow house on the front. And I wasn’t sure if they were led to me, or I was chosen, or if we all simply met mid flight. And I suppose it’s that idea that I like the most, thinking we’re all just trying to make this journey a little lighter, a little more joyful… and wouldn’t it be something if we did our best to lift each other, even with just a wink and a smile.
Anyway, it’s always a good reason to keep looking up.
I don’t remember anyone telling me it was beautiful (and I remember everything), but somehow I knew. It’s everywhere. Just grass and trees. Leaves and bushes and lawns. Flowers left to scatter wild on lengthy stems. (I suppose that’s where they get me, because I think I’m one of them.)
My mother had long legs. And better yet, the longest strides. I thought it was her superpower. For years I ran behind, trying to hang on to her cape. Which day was it that I caught up? No longer in the wave of that cape, the wave of her superpowers, but side by side. There was nothing we couldn’t do. Nowhere we couldn’t go. Stride for stride.
I love to walk still. Though it feels more like flying. I see people in groups in every country. Some wonder, even ask, “Why do you walk alone?” I only smile, because the truth is, I never am. Never will be. I wave and whoosh along the pash.
I told him I needed a ladder. No, my grandfather replied. “But I have to get it back into the tree,” I said without crying, but just barely. Not about to change his response, but curiosity getting the best of him, he asked what. “The nest,” I said. He just smiled and again shook his head no. “A bird’s nest,” I reiterated, as if he just didn’t understand and surely with the added description he would go get the ladder and help me. But he didn’t. “The babies…” I pleaded, having never actually seen them, only heard them from below. “They’re fine. They’re already gone,” he explained. “How did they know? Were they ready?” I asked, still assuming we were all afforded that luxury. “You find a way,” he said, both of us knowing we were no longer talking about the birds. Both of us knowing that it was my house, my nest, that I missed. It was a ladder back to when my father lived with us. When everything seemed certain. A ladder back to the nest of trust and security. There was no ladder. We both knew I would have to find a way. He put his finger on the sore part of my heart, “They will be ok,” he said without crying, but just barely. And I knew, with the certainty of tree and the absence of ladder, that I would be too.
I can’t say that through the years I have not asked for the ladder. Thinking, just get me over this. But I eventually get there. Never over. Always through. And my heart moves from sore, to soar. And I am saved.
The most fun was not when we got it right, but when we got it wrong. Maybe it was the hum of the wheels, or just the fact that we were together, but there was definitely something about being on the bus that made us all want to sing.
We had to rely on each other. We had no cell phones. No radios. Just the memory of the last song we heard on KDWB-63. And I don’t know where the confidence came from. Maybe it was youth. The comfort of open windows. Or just being on a bus with no judgement. That’s not to say there wasn’t laughter. Mid song, someone would always stop between gasps of giggles to say, “You think it’s what?????”
“I’ll never be your beast of burden,” was easily mistaken for “I’ve never seen a pizza burning.” Or when we “heard it in a love song,” — someone sang the ending of “can’t be wrong” — as “ten feet tall.” And we would laugh longer than the length of any song.
And it’s this freedom that I miss the most. The freedom we gave each other. The freedom I gave myself, to make gigantic mistakes. And not be concerned about how it looked, how it sounded — to just have fun!
You know we can still do that. Be free. Free as the birds to just sing it out loud. Without knowledge or permission, we can have a little fun! The buses are running. The skies are open. Will you join me?
I suppose we could have been called anything, and I would have loved it, but we were Cardinals, so the moment I put on the red uniform, for volleyball, basketball, track, band, whatever, whenever, I, we, represented Independent School District #206, and proudly became those beautiful red birds.
We shortened everything. Perhaps we were in such a hurry to grow up. The name of the town, Alexandria, became Alex, and then simply Alek. Cardinals became Cards, always led with a “Go!” I see the urgency now. To get somewhere. To win. And now, it all seems like a fluttering, a blur of red and black wings.
The Alexandria Boys’ Basketball team won the state championship this weekend. I don’t live there anymore. Not even in the country. The high school that I went to has been torn down. I can’t name a player on this year’s team. But somehow, magically, in that winning flutter, I am part of the we — the “We did it!”
Perhaps more than any team, I think the same when remembering my mother. With each victory big or small. Selling a painting, surviving a hard situation, conquering a fear, just being happy for no reason on a Monday morning — I look to the heavens and joyfully say, “We did it!”
We are only as strong as our connections. They don’t have to be cardinals, but they should lift you, help you reach things you never even imagined. They should be the ones you look to, recognize, call you by name, ever tell you, “one way or another, we are going to fly!”
It was in the first aisle of Jerry’s Jack and Jill that I got a nose bleed. My grandma, hands already full with a sack of toasted marshmallows, told me to reach into her folded sleeve around her right elbow. Sure enough, there was a Kleenex. It wasn’t long before I needed another. “Check the other arm,” she said. I switched to the opposite side of the cart, reached into her folded left sleeve, and pulled out another. In aisle three, even after the bleeding had stopped and the marshmallows were nearly gone, I wanted to see how far this went — if Grandma Elsie was actually some sort of magician. “I think I need another one,” I said. “Check my right bra strap,” she said quite confidently. And just like a rabbit from a hat, I pulled out another Kleenex.
And it was magic — the ease with which she could fix any situation. How I counted on it! I suppose we all did. But I never saw the weight of it — the things she carried. How lightly she skirted through the aisles. And certainly things had to bother her – she was a woman of this world, and no one escapes, but still she never weighed upon, but lifted up.
I think about it now. Am I traveling lightly? What is it I’m choosing to carry? The solution, or the burden? I ponder, WWED? (What would Elsie do?) I smile, and I choose the lightness of magic, the lightness of joy, wearing my heart on my sleeve, and sometimes under my bra strap.
I don’t know the origin of the question, but it seems we humans have a big need to get to the answer, right from the start.
He couldn’t have been more than five or six. I was reading to an elementary school in Minneapolis, class by class, starting from the sixth grade to kindergarten. Without exception, even down to this youngest boy, before I began to read from my book, someone asked, “What’s it about?” In true teacher form, the only person seated in a chair would reply, “Just listen…”
Of course I have been guilty as well, in response to: “I just started a new book…” or “I watched a documentary…” Needing to get to the answer. And so often for the bigger questions. What is the suffering about? Why did this happen?
Some will tell you that everything happens for a reason. But I think there may be danger in even this…all that is, is just a longer version of “What’s it all about?”
There is a pattern, I think, when I’m in a struggle, looping through the question, “Why are they like this?”; “Why do I have to?” “How come?” …and for me, it never feels good, this spiraling… Experts of all kinds will tell you what to do. I’m not an expert. I am just another child sitting cross-legged on the gym floor, looking up for the answers, but instead I’m given the song of the birds. They call me with the starting of this new day, telling me to unfold my legs, get up, open your heart…and just listen.
It was hard to believe that something so delicious could make me ill. But it was evident after only a few tries, I couldn’t eat ice cream. Somehow still, I found it very exciting when the pale yellow blur of the Schwan’s ice cream delivery truck drove toward my grandma’s house. I began running up the gravel, hands waving in air, directing him into the driveway. I knew full well that my grandma’s love of root beer floats would never allow her to miss a delivery. I hopped and skipped and ran with the truck to the house. Uniformed and certain, he jumped the steps and went to the back of the truck. “You’re Elsie’s granddaughter?” “Oh, yes!” I said proudly. I could tell by the smiling way he said her name that he liked her. He unloaded two of the giant tubs as my grandma came out the screen door. Her hands ever floured or wet, or both, she wiped them on her apron before signing for our haul of vanilla.
How wonderful, I thought, to deliver ice cream. Everyone must be so happy to see you. I was, and I didn’t even eat it. The only other delivery person that I knew was my Uncle Mike, who drove a beer truck in the Twin Cities. I asked him if people jumped up and down when he arrived. He looked confused. Like I do with the Schwan’s truck, I explained. Not so much, he said. Maybe you should paint your truck yellow, I said. He smiled.
Surely it has to be taught. There must have been a million things my grandma delighted over with me. Things she had no interest in. How else would I have known, known this joy of feeling good for others. I loved art and clothes and drawing and crayons and “Look, look what I made! It’s flowers glued to a scrap of bark! Look!” And my grandma showed all of her teeth in love. An ear to ear joy. This is the only explanation I have for being happy, truly happy, to celebrate a Schwan’s delivery, not for me, but for her!
Joy is not owned. It is passed and given away freely. It is run along beside. A yellow blur of others. The day is pulling toward the driveway. I raise my hands in the air and skip to whatever joy it may bring.
Some say it originated in the Bible. Others will say it came from Viking lore. Even Shakespeare has been given credit. But for me, I know exactly the first time I heard it, this saying — “…a little birdie told me…” — it was on the party line that I wasn’t supposed to be listening to, perched (not unlike a bird ironically) on my grandfather’s chair made out of an old tractor seat underneath the kitchen telephone. My grandma was talking to one of the neighbors about one of the other neighbors. I held my chubby hand over the mouthpiece, but my gasp was still audible when the neighboring party said, “Well, a little birdie told me…” I could hear my grandma both through the line and through the house – “hang up.” I did. And ran through the screen door in search of the talking birds.
The thing is, I couldn’t ask where these special birds were, because that would be admitting to the eavesdropping, so I had to wander the farm on my own. Tree by tree. I could hear them all right, but what were they saying? I climbed each apple tree to get a closer listen. I jumped, nearly falling off the branch when my grandpa asked what I was doing. “Listening to the birds,” I said. “But I don’t know what they’re saying.” He shook his head. “Do you understand them?” I asked. He shook his head yes. I exhaled. Deflated. “What do they say?” I asked him. “Whatever I need to hear,” he smiled and walked back to the barn.
To this day, it’s not about gossip, or telling tales, it’s about listening. Sure, some will say well it’s just your heart, your head, your soul, and maybe it’s true, but I hear them, the birds, while I’m walking, anywhere in this world. They always tell me whatever I need to hear. Telling me that everything is going to be ok, great even…and hand uncovering the mouthpiece, I thank them, and tell them, “I know.”
If you ask, ” How come you’re always going on about your grandfather? What did he give you that was so great?” “Wings,” I say, “He gave me wings.”
My husband saw a bright yellow parakeet in our yard. I was out walking and I missed it. I wonder what our gaggle of regulars thought. They had to have seen it — the pigeons who waddle in the driveway, almost too heavy for flight; the magpies in constant search of the “other”; the doves in between cooing… Surely the woodpeckers perked their heads with the flash of yellow. Even the little bush hoppers that flit in and out so quickly must have caught a glimpse. Because a yellow would pop! In these spring greens and pinks that cover our yard, yellow will always shine. And if they did see it, this bright yellow bird, it hasn’t stopped them from singing. From flying. From hopping around our driveway. From dancing in the water that collects on the freshly sprinkled grass. They seem just fine. Joyful even.
As humans, it can be hard to follow “the nature of things…” I’m trying to get better. To celebrate those around me. To know their yellow doesn’t take anything away from my beige. To understand there is room for all, hopping, flying, stumbling even.
People often ask, “Do you paint self-portraits?” Daily, I think. Never parakeet- pronounced, but I’m there, in each painting. In each tiny, joyful, unobvious bird, I’m there — waiting, grateful for every glimpse of color that hovers by.
