The Amazing Life of Birds

This morning I became twelve years and one week old and last night I had a disturbing dream. Don't worry. It wasn't about ELBOWS.

I'd better explain. Lately I've been thinking a lot about the female body. Not in a weird or sick way but not in an artistic or medical way either. These thoughts aren't intentional. And they happen at the strangest times. I'll be sitting there, thinking of almost nothing, maybe about tightening my loose bicycle pedal, and there it will be, bang! Stuck in my mind: part of a woman's body. The part varies and I don't think it's necessary to say what it is—most readers can probably guess—but it's almost always embarrassing when this happens. Especially if you're sitting talking to, say, the math teacher Mr. Haggerston about
equations and you look down and see not math equations on the paper but an enormous …

You get the idea. So to avoid problems, when this happens I force my mind to think the word ELBOW and I see an ELBOW and think about ELBOWS and wonder about ELBOWS and wish about ELBOWS. It helps. Sometimes.

Anyway, I had this disturbing dream about my father. In the dream he and I are sitting in a huge bird's nest watching a movie on television. The movie is
Ferris Bueller's Day Off.
Once a year since I was eight, my father makes me sit down and watch that movie with him.

He thinks it helps us to bond. Which isn't necessary because we get along just fine anyway. My father is a good guy, and my mother is really nice too, and I even almost get along with my older sister, Karen. I'd do better with Karen if she weren't demon spawn born in the fires of Hades, but she's been that way as long as I can remember.

But we have a good family. And I love them. Even my sister, I guess. We're all bonded as much as you can bond but still, once a year, my father sneaks out that old video. He and I watch it together and he proves once more that he Understands Young People and Knows What It's Like to Be a Boy.

As if.

All I can think when we sit there is in what
possible world would I get a Ferrari to drive around Chicago in with a beautiful girl on my arm and go eat in fancy restaurants while the principal of my school gets munched on by a Rottweiler? I can't even get my bike pedal tightened without thinking about ELBOWS.

But in the dream we're sitting in a bird's nest watching the movie and when it's over my father turns to me and puts his foot on my chest and says: “If you can ELBOW you can fly.” Only of course he doesn't say ELBOW but another word, not a body part.

And he kicks me out of the nest.

Even in the dream I
can't fly.
I plummet down and down, falling and falling until I suddenly wake up and see that I'm in my room holding the pillow like it's somebody I know really well.

I know why I dreamed about the nest; a month ago two birds built a nest on the windowsill of my room, which is upstairs and in back by a tree. It seemed strange at first because there was the tree with lots of limbs, a much better place for a nest. But then I saw Gorm, the neighbor'stomcat, climb the tree and crawl out on the limb nearest the windowsill to try and reach the nest. Gorm is not the brightest chip in the matrix and instead of reaching the birds he rediscovered gravity, landing nicely on his feet but hitting as hard as a bowling ball because he's fat. In fact he
kind of
looks
like a bowling ball. So that's why the birds used the windowsill. It's Gorm-proof.

One of them laid an egg and sat on it until it hatched into the ugliest little dirty brown bird I have ever seen. Then they started to feed him. Or her. They brought it bugs and more bugs and still more bugs, both of them flying back and forth all the time getting food for the little eating machine.

And now it's slightly bigger and still amazingly ugly, pink skinned and with bulging eyes. It has four brown scraggly feathers, two on the top of its head and two at its tail.

The thing is they really love the little bugger, and preen it and feed it and I'm sure would show it
Ferris Bueller's Day Off
if they could.

So that's where the nest comes from—I've been watching the Bird Family Channel for a month.

But why did Dad mention ELBOW? And why kick me out?

Wasn't it enough they'd named me Duane?

Duane.

Homer.

Leech.

Think about it. When you look at it that way, each word separate, it's hard to see how my parents could have done it.

Look, we've all seen those shows on the Discovery Channel where they show a baby being born. There's a man in a hospital gown and a woman on a table and a lot of noise and sweat and there it is.

A baby. Looking actually a lot like the little bird on my windowsill, all messy and ugly.

Me.

And if they'd done a video there would be my
mother and my father smiling with love at me, all goobery and sloppy.

Defenseless, new in the world, not even a clue that someday puberty would come along and body-slam me.

And when they asked what my name would be, my father looked down probably all proud and loving and said: “Duane.

“Homer.

“Leech.”

I didn't have a chance—or maybe I would have had a slight chance, if I'd been name-lucky. People could have called me DH, or skipped the first name and called me Homes, which would be cool, or gone back to the first name and called me Duey, which isn't that good, but still on the edge of being all right.

But that's not what happened.

Oh—this morning the bird had one new small feather growing on the end of his right wing. Five feathers now. It's hard to look at him and see that someday he's going to fly. Or date or grow up to have a family so
he
can make
his
son watch
Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

I decided to name the bird Connor. Which is what I wanted to be named. Or Steve, or Carl, or Clint … anything but Duane. Apparently I had a great-uncle or something named Duane and he did something important—nobody seems to remember what was so special about Duane the First. But the name was
passed down and I got stuck. For my middle name, my father is a history nut and there was a famous Ancient Greek guy named Homer who did a lot of thinking, I guess, so Dad gave me that name so I would think a lot. And there must have been some wacko in our family who grew leeches once upon a time. Or maybe my family just evolved from bloodsuckers….