5:12 p.m.

The trees are unsettled, their limbs tossing in the violent tempest -- gauges for Nature’s wrath or love.  The storm plays like a silent film as I sit in the cabin of my car.  My old campus gym sits in the distance like a stolid mountain.  

The world comes to life in stereo as I step out.  Dashing down the side of the parking lot, my umbrella mimics the trees.  Trying to avoid the rain, I notice an upturned creature on the wet pavement.  I stoop to examine it.  Its pale legs stick up like flags of resignation.  People must think I’m crazy, a university student examining some dead thing.  He must be studying taxidermy.


5:18 p.m.

It’s a baby sparrow.  

Its feathers are maturing over its soft pink underbelly, bunched into a mangy blanket by the rain.  Its feet shiver in the wind.  Dirt, pine needles, and assorted debris are stuck to its body.  I know I shouldn’t pick up dying things; but, I end up cupping it in my hands and walking carefully to my car.  I open the side door and pull out my hand towel to wrap its tiny body.

Good luck little guy.


5:24 p.m.

My muscles strain; my body responds with perspiration.  

Hand towel.  

Sparrow.  

With the back of my hand, I wipe my forehead and carry on.


6:41 p.m.

The rain cools me off as I head back to the car.  I throw my backpack into the trunk and sit down.  My diminutive patient’s makeshift bed rises with each breath.  I twist the car to life.  The smooth mutter of pistons assures working order.  As I glance down, the gas tank needle twitters at a quarter.

I back out wondering whether birds like my music.  For now, it’ll be the radio.  I keep the volume low.  The wipers skim across the glass with methodical squeaks, and I notice my new acquaintance staring at me.  I take the corner softly, ensuring the smoothest of rides.  I think my sisters would be impressed with my sudden respect for trivial traffic laws.  The light ahead turns yellow.  I depress the brake pedal and the stop would please a nitroglycerin transport technician.


7:11 p.m.

I eat dinner with my mom’s nature encyclopedia.  I’ve learnt that baby sparrows can eat strained beef baby food mixed with grain.  My small adoptee is still burrowed in a hand towel cocoon.  Sparrow culture shock, most likely.  I finish a piece of barbequed pork chop.  It probably weighs more than the sparrow.  The thought of vegetarianism crosses my tired synapses.  

I swallow with a pinch of guilt.


7:47 p.m.

At the supermarket, I could only find beef and vegetable baby food, located in an obscure corner under personal care products.  I sit down at my computer desk, thinking of the sparrow as a ‘him’, as if birds have the concept of gender.  Comparing it to pictures online, I find out that he’s a she.  

My apologies, Miss Sparrow.


8:11 p.m.

I don’t think she liked the gender mix-up.  I’ve tried feeding her with chopsticks, tweezers, and my finger.  She has also defecated a few times.  Through a rather unpleasant examination (out of necessity to determine her previous diet) I conclude that she’s been eating a diet of worms, or larvae of sorts.

I head to the backyard compost heap, and grab a shovel.  The smell of decaying organic waste overwhelms me, not to mention the saprophytic creepy-crawlies – all in search of an earthworm.  After sticking my hands deep in last year’s food scraps, I feel one wriggle around my finger.

At the kitchen counter, I place the writhing annelid on the cutting board.  My stomach churns.  I hold a steak knife in my other hand, trading one life for another.  Giving my last respects to the poor creature, I cut.  

It squirms.

I squirm.


9:13 p.m.

The stubborn thing will not eat.  It teases me – beak yawning wide to reveal a small tongue crop, only to snap shut before I can bring anything to its mouth.  This worm will not have involuntarily sacrificed its life for nothing.  I try to pry her mouth open with my fingernail, but she is an obstinate woman.

Damn sparrow.


9:37 p.m.

I fill a small cup with water and tilt it to her mouth and she drinks!  My frustration dissipating, I smile at her wet feathers.  She relieves her bowels on my shirt.

Damn sparrow.


10:11 p.m.

My chopsticks hold a wriggling piece of late-night dinner as she opens her yellow beak and takes the morsel in.  Hallelujah.  Though, she hasn’t swallowed – yet.  Playing the Epicurean, she lets the thing stay in its mouth.  A bug connoisseur.  Cute.  Giving me a funny look, she spits mashed worm onto my arm.  I sigh.  

You know what I say.


10:57 p.m.

Burrowing her head into her soft back, she perches on my forearm while I type at my keyboard.  Her apparent innocence wins me over as I tuck her away on my bed’s mantelpiece beside a copy of Freud’s ‘Civilization and its Discontents’.  Goodnight.

And sweet dreams, if you have any.


7:37 a.m.

I wake up to her chirping.  Perched on my headboard, head tilted, she opens her mouth.  I sit on the corner of my bed, collecting my consciousness from the sheets.   She stares at me.  Okay, okay.


7:42 a.m.

She greedily downs her makeshift grub.  If sparrows could smile, I think this one would.  Recalling my biology, I’m guessing that she weighs approximately 21 grams, lighter than the loose change sitting in my jeans, which reminds me: I need to fill up on gas.


1:25 p.m.

A hundred years ago in 1907, Dr. Duncan MacDougall carried out experiments to measure the weight of the human soul, believing that after death, a tangible mass departed the body.  Comparing their bodies, pre-and-postmortem, he concluded that the soul weighed 21 grams.

A thousand elegiac notions flit across my mind.


5:21 p.m.

I come home and greet my grandmother, sitting in our ex-living room, dying.  She inquires of my little pet, and I show her.  Though she can barely see, she grins, and I smile.  She lives.


6:11 p.m.

I take a break from playing father sparrow.  Tightening my runners, I stretch my legs on the driveway and take a jog in the forest behind the house.  I focus on the gravel.  My soles take turns smacking against the damp path, the crunch of stone against stone, and yet, I cannot focus.  I think about global warming, the polluted biosphere.  I think about a sparrow.  

In the distance, I see old Chinese women doing tai-chi in the park.

Where do I focus?


8:01 p.m.

She hops on my desk.  I pick her up.  In my cupped hands, she wriggles out of my palm and onto my thumb.  

Earlier this year, my grandmother fell and two of her lumbar vertebrae collapsed.  She spent weeks in the hospital leaking urine and blood, while her veins swelled with electrolytes and bliss.  One night, I sat at her bedside studying chemistry and medicine while she muttered, ‘Why won’t you die?’  As I lay in the lumpy hospital cot, I conjured the idea that we were stubborn sparrows who chased the setting sun, fleeing the fat moon at our tails.  But how would it end - with an impassable shore or an endless horizon?  

Smelling of hospital, I didn’t really care.  The sun tucked itself beneath the covers of a skyline, and the clouds drifted like soft ceilings.


7:01 a.m.

Do thoughts have weight?  

Could sparrows be the souls of the departed?

Staring at my silly inquiry, this sparrow chirps.


12:18 p.m.

The scientific community ultimately dismissed Dr. MacDougall’s findings.  His sample size was too small, and his methods included unfortunate canine specimens.  Nevertheless, his theories settled in the gossip of parishioners and the fanciful thought of young men.


5:45 p.m.

A friend suggested I name her Diogeness, in honor of the grumpy Greek.  His wife might have been happier.  Carrying a lamp upstairs, I enter my room and I find her beneath my desk.  I suppose she would ask the great Alexander to set the controls of the light-bulb sun to spite her man.  Reaching down, she hops onto my fingers as I pull her out.  Sitting on my bed, she takes a small jump, descending with a small thud.


9:13 p.m.

I have spent the past hour helping her fly, from my finger perch to shelves, speakers, and a couple walls.  She takes an unsteady hop and settles on a chandelier.  I ponder whether I should keep her or not.  She flaps back down and lands on my shoulder.  Now that she can use her wings, I don’t want her leaving a mess all over the place.  I walk downstairs to the kitchen and take an old hamster cage.  I place a chopstick as perch.  Adding a food tray, I coin it ‘The Barrel’.  It even has a cup.  

Goodnight, Diogeness.


7:11 a.m.

I wake up to find her looking a lot older.  There is a sense of pity in her surrender to the cage.  I open the door and she hops onto my thumb.  I feed her as my brother comes down for breakfast.  He grabs an orange and both of us step out onto the backyard patio.  She grips my fingers tightly.  There are other birds in our fruit trees.

The idea of keeping her as a pet seems selfish.  Yet, she clings.  I bring her to a tree stump and I have to nudge her to get her to hop off.  She looks at me, then the forest.  After a minute of silence, I say to my brother, “I’m not sure if she’s ready to go back.”

As I turn back to her, she flutters onto a nearby tree branch, chirping one last time.  Flapping over to the fence, she joins the other sparrows and glances back.  Within the minute, she disappears into the thick foliage with a new family.  

My brother peels his orange and replies, “Well, I guess there’s your answer.”


8:00 a.m.

I look at the dashboard.  I have yet to fill up on gas.  I back out of my driveway and depress the accelerator.  While driving, I think that it would be nice to write all of this down.  I turn on the stereo and Andrew Bird’s ‘Weather Systems’ album is playing.

“Whenever Paul thinks of rain, swallows fall in a wave and tap on his window with their beaks. Whenever Paul thinks of snow, soft winds blow round his head and his phone rings just once late at night-like a bird calling out, ‘Wake up, Paul.  Don't be scared.  Don't believe you're all alone.’”

Somehow, I feel that the falling seeds and the clouds rolling by are whispering.  Coming to a full stop at a sign, I watch the birds fly westward across the pale blue sky and sigh.

There, is my answer.