The Barking Sparrow In The Cemetery

On days like this my kegels get a good workout as they’re often called up for duty. My little muscular soldiers give my bladder some much needed girding. When me and Chip get together for a bike ride I’m under constant threat of dribbling in my chamois from bursts of sudden laughter. I’ve been trying to discipline and retrain my AWOL bladder control for some time, so this is by far the most enjoyable exercise.

It’s Spring and we’ve resumed our friendship, as always, picking it up where we left it last. We set it back in motion atop two bikes and commence to tour around the quaint, sparsely populated town of Mulberry, where overalled old men still throw out flirtatious winks as we pedal by.

My friend, who gained the childhood nickname of Chip, from her foster father due to her fondness for a certain frozen confection, is quite possibly one of the best friends a girl could have.

Though she waited out my childhood years and the decades of off balance adult chapters with a fit of stops and starts in a multitude of careers and addresses; she finally came forth from the realms of an opposite existence, emerging in the middle of my life as if she had always been there.

We laugh and chat; wonder and worry about life, love, children, grandchildren and ponder the secrets we dare share with only a few.

Our rides seem to have fallen into a natural, meandering route which has a rest stop built in about half way through. Our resting location is appropriately and coincidentally the Mulberry Town Cemetery.

Standing guard on either side of the gravel entrance are two impossibly magnificent and healthy magnolia trees that look as if they belong in a children’s story book. Dismounting our bicycles we begin ambling in no particular direction and stop when a headstone catches our eyes and imaginations. Our deciphering of the lives lived by these people commences and we trade engraved bits and clues, dates and nicknames like “Bunk” with each other.

“He was probably full of bunk,” Chip says, grinning.

We both giggle and move on.

I notice a sparrow fly up from behind the shadow of a marble head stone just ahead of us. It goes only a foot or two, lands and waits. We draw nearer to it, and it does it again. The sparrow flies upward and briefly lands a few more feet ahead of us, but this time lands left of the straight line we’d been traversing.

“Look at that sparrow, Chip,” I say.

“Do you suppose it’s hurt?” she asks.

The ever consummate guardian of abandoned and injured animals worries aloud, and I get a vision of us chasing this injured sparrow around the cemetery in order to abscond with it to the nearest veterinarian’s office. She once kept a single goldfish diagnosed with “fish bloat” alive years past any reasonable life expectancy by feeding it frozen peas. She is the antithesis of suffering.

“I don’t think so,” I hopefully offer.

Earlier we'd both joked about being run over by a car while moving a turtle off the centerline and safely to the other side of the road. Chip stops me as I head off to the side closest to me, turtle in hand.

“Uh, I think he was going to the other side,” she points out.

“Right. Good thinking,” I say, and do an about face.

In the cemetery we try to explain the odd behavior of our new feathered acquaintance.

“It sounds crazy, but it almost looks like she’s trying to get us to follow her, doing her best impression of Lassie,” I say.

Neither one of us is ever too quick to rule out “crazy”, which gives us quite a bit of latitude with which to move about in the subjects we like to ponder and investigate. So, it was not a strange thing for me to say, at any moment I expected this bird to start barking like a collie from the T.V. show Lassie in an effort to get us to follow her. Not strange for two reasons, one, because we both knew Lassie as the altruistic collie played for 20 years across both out childhoods and two, well, anything’s possible.

Still unsure as to whether she’s injured, we follow as our diminutive guide continues to fly in small bursts forward, but only after we’ve caught up to her, zigzagging and briefly pausing as if she’s trying to locate something, or someone. She finally lights on a large marble stone sculpted in the form of a stack of cut logs.

Once we approach the headstone, she seems satisfied and assures us she is perfectly fine by winging her way up to the top of a nearby oak tree.

“Humph,” we say in unison.

A quick survey of the white marble stone and we realize we’re standing before a family plot, a family with an obvious tragedy.

The dates reveal two parents who were sentenced to suffer the loss of their son, going before them in death. This kind of loss is said to exact its toll in the worst kind of devastating grief a parent could ever hope to avoid or survive.

As Chip is my sole witness to these facts, I cannot testify, but only imagine the echo of racking grief which disembodied their lives and wails through the soul of a mother and father who must bear such a burden. As witness and survivor of the same, Chip knows exactly what this is like.

My dear, sweet friend buried her youngest son, Luke, six days before he was to be twenty years old. It has been fifteen years and the loss broke apart something inside her heart which she must piece back together every year on the anniversary of his death. One year, I was honored with the privilege of accompanying her to the exact location of the car accident where she customarily lays her flowers. There’s a marker and the family living a stone’s throw from the fateful culvert ensure it remains intact. They were there that awful night. They know. They expect her every year and she doesn’t disappoint them.

Looking down at the son’s engraved marble slab lying flat next to the pyramid of marble logs, I notice something. There is an oval spot of hardened yellow adhesive where something had been affixed. It’s missing.

“Look, something was here,” I say.

Then, I discover a broken ceramic piece with an oval edge rimmed in gold nearby, and we both set about gathering the rest of the shattered pieces strewn on the ground around the plot.

Once we had all we could find, we squatted down and pieced together what we guessed might be a portrait, and David’s face appeared before us in gray against a white background. We wished for glue or tape, anything to keep what had now become a life in gray and white mosaic in its place.

Perhaps it was a coincidence or maybe the shattered portrait was too troubling for his mother to be left in peace, all those pieces of her son on the ground. So, she elicited the aid of a sparrow to invite the aid and kindness of another mother to meet her on the common and hallowed ground of losing a child.

As long as I’ve known Chip she has been teaching me, preparing me for the grief that is sure to come in my own life, though she doesn’t know it. She’s shown me, despite the pain and desperate sadness, you find a way to go on, sometimes with grace, other times with a gut wrenching will you have no idea where it comes from, when it will leave or when it will return again.

She has shown me you are never the same and that may not be all bad because you’re softer and kinder where grief hollows out the hard places inside you. You’re honed by a compassion which draws understanding solely from the well of pain within. She believes she is not brave or sometimes not strong enough, but oh, all who love her know better than to believe this.