When the who bird calls
Just the other night, while I was sitting in the living room reading “Dombey and Son” by Charles Dickens, I heard an owl asking questions somewhere out in the woods and thought to myself, “I haven’t a clue, but if I find out, you’ll be the first to know.”
Silly thought, I realize, but what kind of person would I be if I didn’t at least think to offer another inhabitant of this fair planet a helping hand – or in this case, a fist full of talons?
“What did you say?” my wife asked, lifting her head from reading something on her cellphone.
“I heard the owl again,” I replied. “Can’t hear THAT in the big city. No sirree.”
She agreed.
The other day as I was walking down the driveway to fetch the empty trash dumpster, I saw a red fox dart into the woods ahead of me. I shouted inside my head, “Well, hello there Mr. Fox. You are looking mighty chipper today; and how is the missus?”
Of course, the fox didn’t answer because 1) I didn’t say it out loud and 2) it’s a fair bet foxes don’t understand English. But I couldn’t help but think that if I HAD and if he COULD, the Fantastic Mr. Fox would’ve said his wife was doing just marvelous, he’d give me the real scoop on how he tricked the farmers Boggis, Bunce and Bean out of their chickens and ducks, and then he’d pontificate on the differences between the book about his adventures written by Roald Dahl and the 2009 movie by the same name.
“Well, foxes have never, and will never, be newspaper columnists who live in trees,” he might have told me. “But the stop-motion animation in the movie was marvelous, don’t you think?”
Absolutely, I would have agreed without hesitation.
Ah, the world is a fabulous place filled with wonderful creatures that are, funny enough, made of the same organic materials as you and me. What’s really interesting to know is that humans even share a high percentage of genes with bananas, mice, fruit flies, pine trees and frogs.
But I ran over a frog the other day while I was mowing the yard, and was a little bit sad about it. Frogs are marvelous creatures. If a human could jump like a frog, we’d never need a ladder to get on the roof to retrieve a Frisbee that landed up there purely by accident; everybody would be basketball stars; and working out with a jump rope would be ludicrous.
The dead frog made me think about John Donne’s poem “No Man is an Island.” To quote a bit from the poem, “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.”
I know, I know. A frog is not a man. But he was just out there in the grass, minding his own business, when WHAM! I sent him off to froggy heaven. And if a frog shares the same organic building blocks as you and I, shouldn’t his death diminish us, even if it’s just a little bit?
And if one dead frog diminishes us, then surely the same can be said of the 20 unwanted dogs that are put to sleep at an animal shelter; or the Sumatran Rhino that went extinct in 2019; or the 38,000 people who die in car accidents every year; or the 100,000 U.S. pandemic deaths that have occurred so far in 2020; or anyone who dies because of the color of their skin.
I think the next time that owl starts asking questions again in the middle of the night, I’ll just tell him: “Who? All of us. Because ‘no man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.’ And that includes you, my old friend. And that includes you.”
