The Birds

Conventional knowledge states that strapping a plastic owl to a tree branch will scare the birds away and keep my car a lot better looking, assuming of course that some vindictive squirrel doesn't chew through the wire, giving me another dent I'm too lazy to repair.

Hedwig was $12.38 and sat quiet in my passenger seat like a sullen grandmother. I propped him up against the dashboard to get a picture, but after a sudden turn I looked over to see him staring out the window and into the sun.

I use to wonder what Nana stared at on our road trips to Myrtle Beach or Ocala when I was growing up. She never would say and I never figured it out until years later, but she would always find something to criticize or complain about. I have a hard time thinking that her goal in life was to find fault in things, but maybe it was. I remember one summer, a year or two after my grandfather died, her, my mom and I were constantly fighting. None of us could have remembered how it started, but it kept going on for weeks. Finally, on Mom's birthday we got the news that she booked the three of us for a week in Myrtle Beach. When we got there our room just happened to be a few doors down from the room where my grandfather died from a heart attack. We went about our vacation and nobody realized until after we got back that we were quiet the whole time. No arguments, harsh words, criticisms or outbursts from me despite being dragged to an outlet mall with no decent toy store in sight. Of course, as soon as we got back to Marietta it didn't take long for her to get back to normal, but in Myrtle Beach the years we went until high school started and baseball kept us busy all summer she was different. We all were.

"I wish I could be a real bird," he probably thought. Instead he's stuck in a box. Pretty soon he'll be out of sight and mostly out of mind, but always above us, glaring down in his angry and judgemental way, but always protecting us.