A Broken Bird

I am not the type top get all maudlin and write depressing poetry and such about animals and such. However, I saw something the other day that just made me shake my head. It was one of those things that happens so fast, right in front of you that you just can’t be sure you saw what you think you saw. Then, when you realize what has happened it brings a kind of sadness to you.

I go for a walk when my morning break comes around. The break lasts fifteen minutes and that’s just enough time to get a nice walk around the building. One of the streets I walk down is a busy street. Cars go flying past on this street. If you try to step out and across this street you had better move very quickly or you could end up very hurt.

As I was walking along I barely noticed the two small birds sitting on a grassy area right near the street. These birds were not particularly special. These were the same small brown noisy birds you find all over the place. A lot of times you find about a billion of them in some tree just outside your room and they make so much noise you want to take a flame thrower to them.

I walked along. The two birds evidently decided it would be a good time to fly someplace across the street. The two birds took off. At that exact time a red mini-van came down the street. It was like the birds were waiting, or flying on a dare to see who could fly right in front of a fast-moving vehicle and make it across the street. The first bird just barely made it, getting enough lift to fly over the front of the mini-van but looking as though the wake of the car was causing a lot of turbulence. The second bird never stood a chance. There was no way the drive could have stopped. In fact, I am betting the driver never knew they hit the bird. The bird took off right into the oncoming vehicle, was smashed and then ground under the tires of the min-van. It was dead in an instant and a mass of broken feathers and bones.

It happened in an instant. It happened so fast that it took me some time to even process what I had just seen. As I said, generally speaking, I don’t get too weepy about things like that but, then again, how often do you really see an animal get hit. Most of the time you find the remnants of an animal on the side of the road and never get to see the accident.

You have to wonder about animals. I mean, the thing I saw was so much like what humans do sometimes. In fact, I nearly had an experience like that first-hand. When I was a kid my friends and I were playing across the street from my house. One of my friends ran across the street to her house and I just blindly rand into the street after her. No sooner had I stepped out from between two cars when I saw myself staring into the grille of a very large red car. The look of shock and terror on the old woman’s face behind the wheel was burned into my brain.

What I saw with those birds was so like it. Like they were having a conversation and bird one said they should fly across the street. Come on, let’s go! The first one took off and instantly realized its mistake but couldn’t shout a warning to its friend behind it.

If I were the type to look for omens I would have figured that would be a bad one. Nothing like seeing a living creature crushed before the onslaught of technology as a kind of metaphor for life and culture. Considering I was about to walk back into the large soulless corporation I work for it sort of drove everything home all the more. Not that I was feeling like a crushed bird or anything but I suddenly realized I might feel that way before the day was over.

Sure enough, by the end of the day I was feeling pretty crushed. Granted, I was still alive and moving around but it was a near thing. By the end of the week I figure I may be feeling a bit more like that.

You have to wonder how people lose touch with the world around them. Mostly, of course, I wonder about managers and how they manage to lose touch with their employees. No matter how hard they try they are, in truth, just like the driver of that mini-van. They are barreling along the road completely oblivious to the animals they may have crushed beneath their wheels. They have idea how badly they have made the lives of the people who work for them. They get so lost in their numbers that they lose touch with the people who make the numbers.

I think that happens a lot in a lot of different places. People lose focus. I know I do. It’s hard to see past your own pain to the pain of the person who might be sitting right next to you. So many people are just caught up with what they are doing they have no idea what they are doing to other people. You just need look at a guy come out of a door. Most people come bursting through a door like they’re doctors entering an emergency room. How many people smash doors open and bash them into the people trying to come into the same door? They always look so surprised when they find the other person there as if they expected the rest of the world to have vanished while they were in the john.

I think too many of us leave broken birds around us throughout the days and weeks. Maybe it’s time to look around.

Bryan W. Alaspa’s new novel “Dust” is available at his website www.bryanalaspa.com and now available at www.amazon.com.