Peace Doves

We were talking about birds. In our front yard we keep a feeder hung from an evergreen bush allowed to grow wild into a tree. A madding crowd of sparrows live in and around the tree, chattering in the shade, taking cover in the rain. Starlings come. And pigeons, but almost never. Odd, because this is Brooklyn, and, well, there are fucking pigeons everywhere. Sometimes cardinals, a memory of my childhood in Chicago, where cardinals are plentiful. For a few years a pair of mourning doves, picking alms from the ground, muttering fluted eulogies.

We were talking about birds. On the wall of my library, a small art piece. Ink on silk, five birds in flight, blocky, jagged, angular, like etchings, like a woodcut. Four with both wings stretched, two with heads turned right, two left, two soar, two flex their wings as they climb. The fifth in profile, one wing behind the other as it lifts, shooting up, going for altitude. Called Peace Doves.

They climb and lift. They soar. They are memory, responsibility, effort, hope, reconciliation.

Memory tells me I received it as a gift for my seventeenth birthday in 1988. But the year doesn’t matter and memory is a fluttering bird. A gift, then, for a birthday, back then, from a friend, not just a friend, much more, even way back, when I was only 17.

We sometimes make stupid awful choices as we stumble toward adulthood, treat each other terribly as we fumble our way through first loves and young heartbreak, we leave others behind, repeat mistakes as we tumble like Jack and Jill down the hill and crack our idiot pates. The doves were a gift from a friend, my closest friend, a beautiful girl with blond hair and Viking forebears, who loved Prince and the Smiths, who wore Doc Martens and punk rock shirts and hippy skirts, who smiled so big. I don’t really know what happened, except that her good friend had once been my girlfriend (this was high school, after all), and not just my girlfriend, but my first real love — and I couldn’t reconcile my heart with my heart and something had to give.

Friends more than half in teenaged love, and then my birthday and her gift and then I stopped speaking to her entirely shortly after that. I don’t really know what happened, though I knew it was cruel. My family moved to North Carolina five months later, nine weeks into my senior year of high school and I have no real memories of having spoken to her between stopping and moving. Less than a year later I was in the army in boot camp. I’d carried the doves with me into the army, taken from its frame, kept in a folder with my letters and photos and writing paper and envelopes and stamps. And the doves were a reminder and so I wrote her for forgiveness. Which she gave in her reply, along with blame and anger at what I’d done, how I’d acted, along with a simple statement of responsibility: if you will be my friend, then you must be my friend. And I couldn’t do it, and though I wrote her back to say I could and would, I never did mail that letter.

And so the birds who climb are a reminder and an admonishment. They are memory and responsibility. You can’t correct the past, but you can try to make good.

One bird in profile, wings upswept, chest puffed with effort as it lifts to soar. Jude, for all the years of your life you’ll need to decide whether to lift or glide. For too many years I misunderstood an important distinction. You don’t struggle and climb and beat your wings til your shoulder muscles rip in order to ease back, take your eyes off the prize, let life ride by. The bird who lifts isn’t looking to glide but to climb, it’s about remaining steady, continuing to try. And so an urging and an urgency.

I don’t know what happened to the kid I used to be, nor even how to make good on the mistakes he made. He never came back from the desert.

For many years I thought my experiences in the army and in combat had made me a man. So strongly did I believe it that I stopped challenging myself to be a man at the age of 19, the age I was when I returned from the war in 1991. After that I only climbed in order to glide.

But through the years, as I faced new challenges that required more and better effort of me than the lessons I’d learned in the military and in combat had taught, I reached a point where they no longer sufficed. And when those reserves ran dry, I was left with the truth that war hadn’t made me a man after all. It had actually retarded my growth, left me a cracked mirror in which to see myself. The war had merely made me old. It took becoming a father to become a man.

But through it all the doves who soar. What’s more, they’ve always been there. A symbol, a sign, a metaphor, a remonstrance to always strive for more, to reach for sky, to keep rocketing high. I may not ever arrive at that perfect height of hope achieved, a life reconciled, but that’s why we continue to lift ourselves up, to climb. For years I didn’t understand.

But we were talking about birds.