September 2010

Oh heart, if one should say to you
that the soul perishes like the body,
answer that the flower withers,
but the seed remains. --Kahlil Gibran

I hit a bird driving to work today. It flew out from the side of the road, low to the ground. My tire must have caught its wing, sending it spiraling into the opposite lane, where it landed, flapping its uninjured wing frantically, but fruitlessly. I was in a pocket of traffic on a busy stretch, with no place to turn off, so I wasn’t able to circle around and try to move it off the road or tend to it in any way. I was forced to continue along as it lay there, maimed and terrified. That it was a robin, the most prosaic of birds, somehow only added to the absolute horror I felt.

It was a fitting end to a week that started with ominous warnings from the vet about the dog’s heart. She’s seven, now, and showing her age in a graying muzzle. Still, dogs her size often live 15 years or more, so we feel like she’s just hitting her stride. Plus, D and I both went grey early, so we laughed that the dog was genetically predisposed to a salt-and-pepper coat. Although I accept that the dog’s span of days will probably be shorter than mine, facing that fact unexpectedly wasn’t easy. To hear the vet talk about canine cardiologists, EKGs and over-night hospital stays was no less difficult than if she’d been referring to my own health, or D’s.

Everything, though, does have its allotted span of days; we certainly see that in the garden this time of year. We’re anxious to cut back the spent coneflowers along the drive—no longer lovely and inviting, but ugly and withered—yet we hesitate: those unattractive remains are filled with seed that the tiny yellow finches love. Pulling down our drive in the morning sends the birds flying out of their perches in the flowerbed like lemon-colored bottle rockets. So, we leave the flower-heads where they are for now, letting the birds, and time, have their way with the remains.

The few vegetables that escaped this year’s bane—the groundhog who’s taken up residence under the barn—are pretty ragged, too. The seeds that D smuggled out of Tuscany last fall have produced a bountiful crop of lovely San Marzano tomatoes. But, like the peppers and eggplants, basil and sage, they’re all spent and ready to be plowed under.

Not long ago, friends loaned us their copy of “Man on Wire,” a recent documentary about a Frenchman who, during the 1970s, managed to finagle his way into, among other places, Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, the Sydney Harbor bridge, and the then-unfinished World Trade Center. In all of these places, the man, with help from friends, was able to string a tight rope and spend time in high-wire acrobatics hundreds of feet above the earth before finally being arrested. The documentary spent most of it time focusing on the walk he took between WTC’s north and south towers. There was no mention—none whatsoever—of the towers’ eventual demise, but foreknowledge infused every scene with a ghostly image of what remained after 9/11.

That those towers are gone is irrefutable. Like this season’s plantings, they’ve been plowed under—dust to dust, ashes to ashes. But, like the coneflower seeds the finches relish, or the packet of Italian tomato seeds D slipped between the pages of his in-flight novel last October, or the impact that a tiny, brown dog has had on the lives of two adult men, there are parts of them that will live on and on, even after all manifestations of the towers, the tomatoes, the dog, have disappeared from the face of this earth.

I don’t know the fate of the robin I injured. Did it struggle in vain until its lifeforce ran dry? Did it, unable to escape the busy road, get run down by oncoming traffic? Did someone stop and at least move it off to the shoulder? Or, did it, by some miracle, shake off its injury and fly away? I didn’t return home by the same road at the end of the day—I didn’t want to know its fate. I could (can) barely stand the suffering I’d caused it.

My only hope is that, if indeed its body withered, like the flower in Kahlil Gibran’s poem, its soul soared off into a bright blue sky—as beautiful and blue today as it was nine years ago.

Requiescat in pace.