His hands were trembling so excitedly that he couldn’t text the group chat about what he had seen.

601.

Some lost birds set off mysteries that make even the most analytical of nerdy birder brains just pause.

The bird he had found belongs to a species that is the most ancient of gulls, whose home is just across the equator, but was now plopped down on our beach a couple miles from my son’s school — even more unusual for a bird that hunts at night and sleeps during the day at sea. This Swallow-Tailed Gull’s home is the Galápagos Islands where now weather patterns have made food scarce. He landed here, 3350 miles away as the crow flies.

At mid-life, there is an accumulation of absences and I imagine it intensifies until the final absence. I wouldn’t dare count them like birds, but they are related, each one becoming more precious, more miraculous, more stinging, and adds evidence to some sort of hidden pattern that will stubbornly remain just out of sight. One took flight almost a year ago, and I didn’t know it until this week.

Just like other birds, when I look back there was a mundane attempt to connect with me and say hello, which now I know was a goodbye. And in my list of birds, for some I have had the presence of mind to answer, and sometimes the presence of mind to not. For her, I didn’t answer the voice in my head that knew something had happened and I texted sheepishly and waited. In our last call, she had some repetitions and some irrational thoughts, and as I watched orioles eat mulberries in the neighbor’s tree, I listened to her lecture on the political nightmares from her Facebook and CNN lens of the world.

25 years before I had been one of a few in a snobby university enrolled in her courses, where we instantly understood we could be ourselves. I took several courses from her including two in Biblical Studies even while deep into feminist activism. I asked her to be my advisor, the year she was told she was removed from tenure track.

A few years ago, I made a sort of pilgrimage to see her in the Midwest town of her final professorship. We talked non-stop, the kind where my throat hurt and my head ached, but there was so much to learn and so much to explore with her. She told me about her life before she decided to get a PhD, which she didn’t do until her late 40’s. Years of Jungian analysis, what Anne Sexton was like in person, her childhood boarding school run by nuns who all seemed to have “lost husbands in the war.” She asked so many questions in the way I felt she cared about the depths of me. I reminded her that she once taught us that the bible in Hebrew contains idioms and euphemisms not available in English translations. For example, feet is a euphemism for male genitalia, and then she let our young minds run through the list of people who wash Jesus’ feet, and whose feet he washes, and on and on. Now, 25 years later she had totally forgotten saying that, but she laughed and said, I guess the point is, who is the authority?

She was a devout Catholic, and felt the church could be changed from within. She and her fellow Catholics did vigils in front of buildings where executions were occurring, lined up near nuclear plants, and fed the poor. She told me you couldn’t donate more than $500 to the Catholic Worker she belonged to, otherwise you had money that was likely made from exploiting others and they wouldn’t want it.

I reminded her that she took me to the University Faculty Club for dinner. That she put down the Diet Coke can that was always in her hand just to order another one the moment we arrived, and there in my Doc Martens and piercings, I listened to her whisper gossips of other department faculty. She told me she never ate there and thought it perfect to invite me so we could delight ourselves as two outsiders irreverently feasting ourselves in the ivory tower.

In the Midwest, I slept in her home of books, books lining every possible wall, from floor to ceiling. The guest bed was directly below rows upon rows of early editions Virginia Woolf novels and essays. Along other shelves were books she had written for young people, she said her favorite was about a talking bear and another about a teenage girl discovering life is not going to work out the way she thought. And it still breaks my heart to remember every little scribble of a bird drawing or postcard I sent her over the 25 years, framed and perched on her shelves. One sparrow sketch sat next to a humbly embroidered fabric that read: An immaculate home is a sign of a mis-spent life.

There is a trick that birders sometimes use to coax a bird out into the open, one that should be used prudently because of the stress it can cause. Afterall, the rare ones are usually lost. A birder uses their phone to play a digital recording of the bird species’ song which can trigger a territorial response, or the species’ call which can trigger a search for a flock. On my phone I have a handful of voicemails of people who are no longer here, their voices as fresh as today, sometimes wishing me a happy birthday, one was reaching out to console me after a loss, one is from Alice asking me to call her back a little later when she returns home.

There was no need to play a sound for the Swallow-Tailed Gull, as it slept out in the open for a row of 30 birders lined up admiring it. I had to go home after a few hours, my youngest son can only stare at a gull and listen to bird-talk for so long. Later a birder friend wrote me, describing with uncharacteristic melancholy the moment when the sun sunk right above the ocean and the gull gathered itself up into flight, disappearing out over the horizon. When I left Alice in the Midwest, she watched from the sidewalk as my car left her driveway. She yelled out, see you around, kid.

O birds, I’ll sing to myself, you’ve carried
me along on this bloody voyage,
carry me now into that cloud
into the marvel of this final night.

James Harrison (1990) – The Theory and Practice of Rivers and New Poems