One-Eyed Charlie

An Unlikely Metaphor

My second floor office is suction cupped with two bird seed feeders and a suet cage. This location I call my full nest, as opposed to the empty nest I’ve become used to, but still haunts the rest of my house like the gong from a rusty bell. While I’m left to ache for my children, this new perch has offered me front row to drama and joy in equal measure.

Like the movement of the birds themselves, arguments are quick and decisive and happen too high up to attract the bears. But mostly they feed together as unlikely friends--finches chitter, chickadees and woodpeckers beep beep, the carolina wren gives its soprano song while the nuthatch waits for the titmice and the bluebirds to clear the way before they swoop in and get their fill.

Many lifetimes ago my parents and uncle were driving down a country road, when they heard a heartbreaking thunk, and saw the leap of a deer from the corner of their eye. No one had the nerve to look at the front of the car to see the extent of the damage.

On that fateful day my uncle and dad tiptoed along either side of the hood until one of them screamed and they both ran back into the car, breathless. In their best native Bronx one panted, “Holy shit. I saw a nose.” The other claimed sight of a foot.

“A hoof,” my mother corrected, unable to help herself, even though she’d been the one behind the wheel.

My wildlife friend gave me a kinder version of the look that gas station attendant gave my family as he peeled Bambi's mom and the grill of my father’s limited edition Buick LeSabre twenty miles down the road. A shake of the head and scrunch of the nose that communicated, you bullshit city folks, you wasted perfectly good food.

With that same look, my wildlife expert said about the friendly nature of my flock, “They’re fine for now. Forget to feed them for a few days though and find out.”

Surely, this is an apt metaphor.

I’ve had to take the habitat down for two weeks due to avian pink eye. I felt horrible as the ceaseless flutter of aggrieved wings and their accusations against me kept popping up where the bounty used to be.

One lovely summer morning, I remembered to fill the seed trays when the jays came swooping in to scream at me, not dive bombing the yard, but coming in awfully close until I ran upstairs to scoop some mealworms into the feeder, and they were off to their next rest stop.

In this time of shattering uncertainty, the steady distracting thump of visiting birds brings me back to my meditative center no matter what’s happening around the corner. They don’t care who’s in charge as long as the nuts keep coming.

I get a lot of year rounders, the tiny feathered balls of warmth who peck through fatty peanut butter cakes I leave out for them. Their habits have become my most reliable pacifier.

All of which is to say, when a downy woodpecker landed in the feeder with crazy hair and the side of their pellet eye caked and bleeding, I figured they’d been in a fight.

My farm girl neighbor is very practical about such things. Without actually bothering her, I asked myself, what would she do? She probably knew how to sing to it to heal it, or at least get it to a place to rehab. Either that or she’d know when it was time to shoot it. It’s not as if I could open the window and invite it inside. It was on its own.

“Have a good last seed or two. Sure, take some suet,” I whispered, knowing its odds weren’t good. I feel so utterly powerless now, powerless to make the people I love feel or be safe, powerless to make sense of values I held for so long borne on the wind like a dandelion in spring. And through all of it, I haven’t lost my overblown empathy. At least for the birds.

The snow and freezing temperatures had settled in. A lot of my work consists of avoiding work and the birds are my ADD happy place. It was a quiet time of the day in the nest.

When I heard the landing and saw the downy woodpecker I smiled wide eyed at it. There was something poignant about this woodpecker’s earnest appetite despite its impending end. I went back to keyboard clacking, inspired.

I’m up earlier than the early birds usually, and I fill feeders before, so that the earliest birds get more than worms. As the gray light pushed out the dark one morning, it was back and hungry. I named it One-eyed Charlie and then realized she was a female when I saw there was no telltale red dot at the top of its head. I shouldn’t have been surprised that she was fighting, maybe she even started it. I know how viscous some females can be.

I thought about Charlie more than I wanted. For the next three days I was happy to see that she returned, mostly during the quiet hours. I was sure it was only a matter of time. At least I could provide her with a steady supply of food and a place to land.

She returned, again and again, her own sort of meditation.

I watched her once and she flew to the base of the tree and walked her way up to perch either close to her nest or with a direct sightline of the window, albeit, cockeyed.

With rising alarm, I witness all the undoing and the redoing, the wacky framing, and the acid wash over all the paintings to make them look a certain way. That friends are enemies and vice versa, that congress is the most powerless entity I’ve ever heard of, give or take an executive and judge or two.

I am trying not to get too caught up in the dismantling of the country, though that’s close to impossible. I don’t want to see but I cannot look away.

Genuine surprise is slipping further and further away. A one eyed woodpecker gives me hope, and I’m sure even she’s on borrowed time.

Everyday I expect not to see her. But everyday she picks a quiet hour and feasts. It might take a few hops around the suet cage until she finds a workable perch. In the background, and without any hope for credit, I make sure not to let the cake go too small.

And yet, life courses, birdlike through her veins? She’s finding the right angles despite the ceaseless nagging of the finches.

I’ve been tiptoeing through the landmine of my longer memoir, the one this blog has been me gearing up for. There are things I never wanted to take a look at again, but I need to play with the raw materials in order to recreate or create or maybe procreate my masterpiece. And it’s time. I really do long to.

Even a sunshine blower like me with an almost indefatigable bellows is starting to simmer around the edges. People I know, including myself, are frightened and I cannot say we don’t have a good reason.

It's been close to two weeks and still Charlie keeps coming. It’s enough to give a spark of hope.

Yesterday, again! She must have been a handsome bird once. Now her chest is dirty, her eye is either not there or still caked shut, and yet she is eating, she has found shelter somewhere and has made accommodations. She is a fighter in the way we all need to be now, no matter your circumstance.

This morning I’m less worried. She’s made it this far. An owl could swoop in on her bad side and take her tonight. A bobcat, or even a house cat could grab her easily enough that she wouldn't know what hit her. In the meantime she’s here everyday, half blind, but managing. Her blank eye is trained on me, the other into the trees. She takes off as the blue jays come in for a landing.

All she needs to do now is to survive the rest of this harsh winter and find sustenance where she can. May we all locate a friendly feeder and figure out a quiet time to land.

***

Epilogue

The morning after I wrote this piece, my husband called out to me as he opened the front door.

“Oh, no,” he said. “There’s a dead bird out here!”

I closed my eyes, knowing it was Charlie. I couldn’t keep her alive. This bird who’d filled me with such hope was gone. I cried. I couldn’t save her despite all of my good intentions.

My husband, the doubter of every, “woo woo” story I’ve ever told, whispered to me reverently.

“I think she came here to die with you.”

Good intentions don’t save lives, haven’t we learned this the hard way? Perhaps this was her last stop, but she died with a full belly next to a kind heart and that’s more than many get.

Ultimately, I am the desperate apple from a very old tree. I don’t have the nerve to touch dead things. I scrunched up my nose.

“You’ll do something with her, right?”

The winter has broken into spring since Charlie’s gone, even if it proves only a fake reprieve. New England has a way of freezing well after it’s seemly. Or at least it used to. These are the times we were given. May we all look to our own north star and aim wisely.