As I did yesterday, I'm guessing a bit at the year here. Let's say ... 1975 or 76. I'm seven or eight years old, it's summertime, and I'm on a country road outside Lawrence, Kansas, with my mother in the backseat of a car driven by her father — my grandfather. I assume my grandmother was in the front seat next to him, but I don't remember. It might even have been my father, or an aunt — I just don't remember.
What I do remember is seeing, as we sped down that country road, two small birds — maybe just sparrows — chasing each other playfully in front of us, swooping down and around. As we caught up to them they swooped down right in front of our car, and when I turned to look out the back window to make sure they were all right, I saw, receding behind us, one of them lying dead on the road and the other perched next to it, looking at it.
I gasped, horrified, and spun around with my mouth open to say something. I may even have gotten a word or two out — "hey, we ...!" before my mother put her arm on me, pulled me back to the seat, and shushed me urgently, shaking her head. We continued on our way, my stomach hurting, starting immediately on a fruitless life-long effort to erase the scene I had witnessed from my memory.
My grandfather grew up on a farm, in a different time, of course, and there's little doubt that he would have waved off my concern, and maybe even have laughed at it. I don't know. He loved me, and I was comfortable around him, but I knew that he was from a harder time, and a harder world, and that he had little time for ... childish worries about dead sparrows on the side of the road.
More importantly, my mother had had a fraught relationship with him all of her life, and there's no doubt that she certainly expected his reaction to be ... unpleasant, and not what a sensitive little 8-year-old boy would have wanted or hoped for. She had been on the receiving end of his "discipline" throughout her childhood, and she saw him more as a bully than a caring and loving man. In restraining me, I knew even then that she was protecting me from what she fully expected to be a dismissive, a callous, and maybe even a mocking response.
And I appreciate it. I appreciated it even then. I knew immediately that he certainly hadn't done it on purpose, that there was nothing anyone could have done about it, and there was nothing to be gained by expressing my horror at what happened — and I knew that my grandfather's reaction would not have been sympathetic.
But ... it hurt. It still hurts, if I'm being honest. So much was involved. The abrupt injection of death, for God's sake, into what had been a happy family drive. I couldn't help thinking — I continue to think — about the initial confusion, then the immense pain of the bird's playmate, sitting on the side of the road, trying to make sense of his partner's death. My mother's traumatic upbringing, immediately brought to bear — and her instinctive desire to protect me from the pain she had experienced so frequently in her own childhood. My grandfather's Depression-era childhood on a farm in Western Kansas. And of course a child's observation of and participation in all of this.
I should emphasize that my grandfather loved me, and my experience of him was never anything but positive, though I certainly was aware of his temperament and inclinations. He also relaxed noticeably — dramatically — in the last decade of his life, becoming unexpectedly sentimental and good-humored. I do not mean to castigate or indict him. That's not the point.
Still, the memory of that drive still brings up strong emotions in me. Of sadness for the birds, of course, whose playful flirtation was immediately and unfairly ended in the most violent way. Of sympathy for my mother and recognition of and appreciation for her instinct to protect me. Even a little wincing recognition that the transition from childhood to a more callous adulthood is not easy, is not painless.
Nasty, brutish, and short, indeed.
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