In Memory of a Crow

He was wandering around the concrete parking space in which our property manager parks. He looked old with a bit of gray around his neck, but the rest of his feathers were shiny and black. The fact that he was wandering around instead of flying and seemed confused made me worry that he was of a sufficiently advanced age that he would pass away soon. I didn't want to startle him, so I walked no closer than about five feet and I said to him, “Don't die alone.”

Five days later, I was sitting at my desk and I heard a rustling noise in a very tall tree across the parking lot and opposite my window. I looked over and thought I saw a dead branch with something black on it fall down. At first, I thought a squirrel had made a bad judgment and perched on a dead branch, but when I looked down at the ground, I saw that it was a black bird. I suspected at that time that it was him, but figured he'd probably fly away if I went near.

I watched from the window to see what his disposition was. His black wings were each splayed out to one side and he seemed to be struggling to get up on his feet. Wings flapping, he managed to finally “sit up” and after some time passed and he did not move, I went down to discern his disposition.

Once again, I didn't want to approach too closely as I didn't want to alarm him, especially if he was already in a bad way from the fall of about 20 feet. I said, “Are you okay?” He gave me no notice and just seemed to look around and sit there. I wondered if he was dazed from the fall and would recover and move along when he was less stunned so I went back inside.

After an hour had passed, and he did not move from his spot at the front of a numbered parking spot, I went down to check on his condition. He was quiet, but I wondered if he needed some water in the California drought so I collected some in a plastic container and took it down. As I approached quite closely, he didn't seem to see me at all. Cloudy eyes blinked and his head moved from side to side. I put the water near him and attempted to put a little on his beak so he could feel it and maybe know that water was nearby. The reaction to my efforts was utter obliviousness. I left him in peace for a time and went back into my apartment.

Another 30 or so minutes went by, and he still had not moved and I became more concerned. When I climbed down the stairs a third time to check on him, I found him making squeaky noises and occasionally fluttering his wings. I suspected he was dying, or at the least injured and in pain, so I called the animal control agency and talked to a woman named “Lisa.” She told me their people were far away and couldn't come for at least a few hours, but asked if I could put him in a box with paper towels at the bottom and on the top to keep him until they arrived. She told me to pick him up with a towel and not to directly touch him or give him food or water because he could drown if he was internally injured.

With the phone to my ear, I looked down and saw that he was not moving and told her that he may have already died. She encouraged me to investigate and call her back. I took my box and towel and found him struggling to breath and making noises which sounded like the crow version of a death rattle. As I very gently wrapped the softest towel I had around his body, he seemed not to react at all. It was as if he'd already been removed from the external world and was utterly focused on his internal experience. I called Lisa back and she said they'd come for him even if he died while I kept him.

“I didn't want you to die alone,” I told him and I watched him in the box for a little while. There were greenish fluids occasionally spreading out on the paper towels on the bottom. He sometimes shifted his head around or tried to flap his wings and the rattling sounds became somewhat more pronounced. I wondered if he would have preferred to die alone in the parking lot on concrete four feet from the tree he'd fallen out of. Would he prefer to be out in what passed for “nature” in these parts than to be in my apartment in a cardboard shipping box from Amazon? “I didn't want you to die alone,” I repeated.

Fifteen minutes passed and he seemed to make one final shift and attempt to spread his wings and fly, then he and stopped struggling. He wrapped his wings close to his body and lay his head down as if surrendering to the inevitable. His body heaved as he breathed for just a little while longer and then he grew still. An ant that came along for the ride roamed about the paper towel in the box. Somehow, this seemed fitting as crows rub ants all over their bodies to ward off parasites. The ant was like the servant buried with the pharaoh to serve him in the afterlife.

We have a candle that was given to us by a woman who works doing therapy for people in grief. It's a tall yellow candle in a tubular-shaped glass vessel. It just so happened to have a paper crane tied to the side with a ribbon. In Japan, these origami cranes symbolize luck. If you make a thousand of them, you are supposed to have eternally good fortune. I only had one crane. For the crow, there could be no luck, but I made a memorial for him. The box with paper towels was his casket, and I burned a candle to light his way and to observe the loss of his life from this world.

I cried when I was sure he'd died. I cried because he didn't die with other crows. I cried because something that was alive was no longer so and it always feels as though the earth has suffered a loss of complex energy patterns. I cried because I worried that he'd suffered at the end. I cried because he seemed to be alone for days and I don't think any creature should be so alone.

At least he did not die alone. He died with me.

Two Bottles

The car was a boat, but this wasn't a problem because gas was only 35 cents a gallon. My sister got to sit in the front seat while a large paper sack of groceries and two glass one-quart bottles of soda occupied the back seat with me. The seats were dark gray vinyl, but worn in the spots that people planted their posteriors. I was in the middle of one of these whitish areas, sans seatbelt, as was the style in those days.

I couldn't see over the seats and had little interest in the contents of the grocery bag. My mother stopped at a stoplight, and I looked over at the two bottles. One of them was green with a white shield design on the label. The other was clear with a dark liquid. I could read then, but not particularly well. I knew one bottle was ginger ale, and the other was cola.

As I sat there waiting for the light to change and signal the changing of scenery, I felt bored and decided to see what would happen if I pushed the two bottles together. At nearly the moment that the light changed, I pushed one into the other. There was a noise as the glass shattered and the liquid spilled all over the seats. My finger started to bleed and I began to cry.

I cried out of fear rather than out of pain. My mother verbally lashed out at me severely if I made even the smallest mistake, and I'd just made a very big one. Instead of being angry with me, my mother pulled over and was filled with concern for my copiously bleeding finger. She thought the bottles had broken because of the car's movement. She didn't know that it was my fault, and I never told her.

The Green Towel

An enormous green towel was wrapped around her head. It was the sort that people tend to use to dry their bodies rather than their hair. The way it was swirled around resembled an overly loaded soft serve ice cream cone. In her case, it would have been matcha - Japanese green tea - flavored.

She was wearing a sleeveless scoop-necked flower-printed top and a pair of white pants. Her body was a little pudgy with the sort of flabby arms that indicated the encroachment of middle age or perhaps the ravages of weight gained through successive child-bearing. The flesh at the top was slightly reddish and speckled with blemishes.

Most of the time, she faced the objects of her interest, a large number of bulging trash bags sitting in front of a sealed Goodwill collection container. The container, which is usually manned by a bored old gentleman who wiles away the time listening to music on an antiquated boombox, is like the back-end of a semi truck without it's cab.

People had dropped their donations off outside of the unmanned container on the weekend and the towel-headed lady was rummaging through them. Occasionally, she'd toss an item into the heap of junk in the bed of her white pick-up truck. The truck's size and shape indicated its age, though the body seemed to be in fair condition and paint relatively intact. Unlike modern trucks that have angled cabs with organically rounded edges and sleek, narrow beds, this one was boxy and huge. Keeping the gas tank in it likely set her back a pretty penny.

I walked by her on my way to the store, blue parasol in hand and black backpack strapped on. I was going to the discount market around the corner and down the block. My presence did nothing to interrupt her task and she continued to busy herself with rummaging through lumpy black and white plastic bags despite my presence. Unwanted items were left strewn over the ground as she skipped the middle-man in acquiring other people's unwanted possessions.

Mary

A hollow banging caught my attention. I'd heard the sound many times and it always resulted in a small amount of confusion. Was someone "knocking" on my screen door or my neighbor's? Somehow, the sound on the metal frame made it impossible to determine the proximity of the visitor.

I got up to peek through the blinds and see if someone wanted my attention. A look to the left showed no one at my door and a glance to the right showed a tall, thin person with what seemed, on cursory inspection, to be spiky blond hair. The viewing angle of my neighbor's door through the blinds was too extreme to clearly see who was there, but that person rapidly became more insist in her attempts at ingress. When no one answered her pounding, she started demanding, "Open the door! You must open the door!"

My neighbor is a petite young woman with a toddler and a Master's degree in biology. She's from India and has been in America for a few years while her husband works at a local university and things aren't always what she'd hope for here. Her unhappiness spills out from time to time as she feels isolated and dissatisfied with life here. It's a club she and I are in together.

She once remarked to me that a dangerous-looking man beat on her door and insisted that she open up. He was looking for the same apartment number in the building next door and had gotten confused. That complex is identical to ours and delivery people and visitors often mistake one building with the other. Superficially, they appear to be the same, but they have different owners and the other building offers low-income housing and ours does not. Three fires broke out in three months over there. Police once swarmed the area and threatened to tase a man if he didn't submit. By the time I got to my window to see, his jacket and water bottle lay on the ground that he'd dropped to in order to avoid being stunned.

Circumstances make it clear to those of us in this building that people who visit that building aren't always looking for convivial conversation and companionship. It's a magnet for shady characters who are likely calling upon other shadier characters or at least those who consort with drug dealers and deadbeat dads who stalk their exes. Sometimes those characters can't read building numbers and make their way to us.

As I heard the commotion, I worried that another suspicious character had mistaken "2785" for "2765" and I knew my neighbor was afraid to open her door when her husband wasn't home. I grabbed my keys with the intent of pretending to check my mail and see if there was trouble that I could do something about. Sometimes, the mere presence of another person, even a fat, middle-aged woman like me, will spook an interloper with malicious intent and the problem will be safely and easily solved.

As I walked out, I simultaneously saw the door to unit 16 finally open up and I identified the person who was aggressively trying to get my neighbor's attention. Several months ago, the woman who owns the building in which we're renting an apartment swooped through my place in response to an ongoing problem with our nearly deaf and ancient neighbors. We wanted to change apartments so that we were above a car port rather than elderly people with serious hearing impairment. The landlady sniffed imperiously that, "Switching apartments is just not done! We don't do that." Mary didn't allow tenants with a problem to move to one in which they wouldn't have that problem, but she did bang on her renters' doors like a deranged lunatic and demand that they open up.

To carry out my charade, I looked at the keys in my hand and chose the mail box key even though I'm sure such selection would go unnoticed by the two parties down the walkway from me. I knew the box would be empty as I'd gotten the mail earlier, but I wanted to make my presence as I walked by appear normal and credible. I couldn't hear everything that was said as I passed by, walked down the steps, and peered with feigned curiosity into the hollow mail box, but fragments of Mary's agitated speech floated in the air. "My partner saw a man on your couch... You need to fill this out with the name of everybody who lives here... Then we'll decide if we'll still let you live here!"

After pretending to check the mail, I returned to my apartment and strained to catch more of the conversation. My neighbor's voice was soft and confused and Mary just kept repeating her bullet points in her tirade. My speculation was that a visitor may have smoked in their place and Mary's partner, Gary, saw that and they were threatening to toss the family out because of violations of the fire codes. I later learned that the truth was much less logical than my fiction.

I had seen Gary skulk around the area the previous day, but thought nothing of it. He seemed to be looking for something and passed by me as I hauled my dry clothes up from the laundry room. As he passed me by, he asked, "Miss, are you 11 or 13?" I answered, "No, I'm 17," though I actually am not my apartment number. I am a writer, an intellectual, and a person of passion and sensitivity, but I figured he preferred to reduce me down to a tidy number in our brief exchange.

I thought Gary was checking out recently vacated apartments as our building seems to be in a constant state of flux. Instead, he was  presumably peeking in everyone's front door to see how they were living on his property. The drama I'd seen was precipitated by his report of seeing a strange man on the neighbor's sofa who he did not believe was on the lease. The notion that such a person may have been a visitor seemingly did not occur to him, but the truth is that my neighbors never have any guests so he likely saw a ghost, had a psychotic episode and hallucinated, saw my neighbor's husband and didn't realize it was him, or saw someone in another person's apartment and confused the units.

Regardless of the origin of this fiction of an unauthorized person residing in that apartment, Mary went batty at the notion that a veritable tribe of Indians were cramming into the one-bedroom apartment that my neighbor has been renting for over two years. She spied a small, thin mattress that was placed in front of the window for the toddler to play on so he doesn't fall and hurt himself and ranted about how another person must be living there and sleeping on that mattress. Mary went so far as to say one could not keep a bed or mattress in the living room and ordered that it be removed. Many months ago, I sat and spoke to my neighbor in her place for well over an hour and I know for a fact that the only person small enough to fit on that padding would have to be younger than ten and the only person who could be comfortable would be one that liked sleeping on bare floors as it is as thin as a matzo.

Later, the property manager came by to smooth over the feathers ruffled by rich-entitled-white-lady nuttiness. He asked me what I had seen and I related what I'd witnessed. During our exchange, he revealed that Mary was preoccupied with telling people how they could live inside of the dwellings she was being well-paid to permit them to occupy and that she'd similarly harassed another tenant on the other side of the building. It is insufficient for her to soak us to the bone for rent money while not fixing the plumbing that is so bad that toilet contents will often float back up to the tank in the middle of the night or attending to floors so thin and hollow that they actually seem to amplify unpleasant sound all over the apartment; she also wants to tell us how we can arrange our furniture and what we can and can't do in any particular space.

My neighbor cried to her husband when he came home. I asked the property manager if Mary was getting the help she needed. I also wondered when she'd show up beating on my door one day to tell me that my husband and I can't sleep on the sofa bed that we keep in our living room. The drama concluded, we all said goodbye, closed our rented doors, and every single one of us hopes to find another apartment soon, including the property manager who is just as unhappy as the rest of us.

Eric K

When I walked into the office, Cindy was sitting at her desk blubbering with make-up running down her face. A few other people, including the chain-smoking, sandy-haired senior who she had an unrequited crush on, were standing around looking grim. No one spoke up so the idea that Cindy was being histrionic flashed through my mind. Perhaps they were uncomfortable as she was prone to reacting emotionally to the smallest of disappointments.

With no explanation forthcoming, I asked Cindy what was happening. She looked at me with black-smudged and red eyes and blurted out, "Eric is dead." There were two Erics in my life at that time, and this one was a "lesser" one. He wasn't less in any sense of his personal value, but rather in terms of how long and how well I'd known him.

This Eric, Eric K, was a member of the psychology club to which I also belonged. My main experience with him was traveling to a Hare Krishna temple in West Virginia on a trip that we took as a group in order to experience a vastly different culture without having to leave the country. We saw a golden temple there and ate vegetarian lasagna that tasted very strange to me. Eric had copper red hair, a cheesy mustache, and blue eyes. His nature was gentle and soft-spoken and he was polite in assessing the quality of the funky lasagna. Now, he was, quite confusingly, dead in his twenty-first year on the planet.

Through sobs and streaming tears, Cindy stammered out some incomprehensible details about Eric's having tried to rescue a girl who was being abused by her boyfriend. Eric and a friend were walking through a parking lot and a man was trying to drag a woman into a car by her arm. The boyfriend stabbed Eric in the neck and Eric's companion in the chest. The companion survived his wound, but Eric bled to death in the parking lot. His life just drained out onto the ground.

Sometimes I think about Eric and what his life might have been had he not decided to help a woman in distress. He wouldn't have died, but he would have lived knowing he didn't step in when he might have to protect someone who appeared to need protection. The most bitter part of my memory is knowing that his killer got off because the girlfriend claimed that Eric and his companion were threatening and aggressive in their attempts to help her. I wasn't there, but I'm very comfortable calling her a liar. There was no way that gentle soul with the cheesy mustache meant to do anything other than help. R.I.P. Eric. You are not forgotten, even by those whose lives you touched in a cursory fashion.

137 Steps

She's petite with pencil thin legs. Her hair is long and black, but she usually wears it pulled back. She seems to favor print pants that hug her lower body and legs and frequently wears a hoody or jacket no matter what the weather. The bump in her belly seems misplaced both with her age, which can't be much more than 25 and could be much younger, and her physique.

Every day, she paces back and forth across the parking lot in front of my apartment. She does this morning noon and night. The same 137 steps are traced back and forth across this small, barren, pragmatic space. The whole world exists beyond that lot, but she paces there like she's in a prison yard.

I want to ask her why she doesn't walk over to the shopping mall that is just three minutes away or walk in the park which is about five minutes from this asphalt cul-de-sac, but I don't want to invade her privacy or appear to be disapproving. A few times, she has made eye contact with me or my husband and has smiled once. After that cursory recognition, she has kept her eyes on the ground when we happen across her, as if acknowledging our presence too many times during her repetitive trek will reveal that she seems imprisoned within the length of a parking lot.

Anticipation

Early in the morning, I wake up before he does. I look over at his face. It looks slightly droopy in its state of complete relaxation, but that is as much about his beard as his age. Usually, his shoulder is free of the sheet he uses for cover. The bare skin entices me to reach out and touch it, but I resist.

The price of waking up first is this longing for what is close at hand, but untouchable in the moment. It is desire not yet, but soon to be, fulfilled. It carries the sweetness of anticipation.

Shadow

An atypical wind blew as I rounded a corner and blew my umbrella inside-out. I inverted it back to its former form, but one support was permanently bent in the wrong direction. To prevent any further mishaps, I put it away until the breeze died down. I closed up the compact ersatz parasol and struggled to secure it with it's aging, fuzzy Velcro closure. Once successful, I hung it from my left wrist by the loop on the handle.

As I rounded a corner, I swung my arm slightly and the top flung off of the the handle. Though I can't seem to remember the fact, the screw that secured the two pieces was lost more than a year ago. I bent down to pick it up and noticed that two women were sitting on colorful towels on the sidewalk directly in my path. It took a moment, but I figured out that they were lifting small hand weights and counting outside. This choice was no doubt spurred by the hotter than usual spring day.

I stepped off the sidewalk to accommodate their workout and said hello to them as I started to pass by. The one on the right, a woman with beautifully clear very dark skin, asked, "Aren't you usually walking with a man?" After being momentarily stunned by her intimate knowledge of my habits despite not knowing me, I smiled and told her that I usually walked with my husband, but he was at work at that time.

I asked her if she lived around there and she pointed back at a tidy, smallish yellow house behind her. I started to ask her if she owned one of the many friendly cats in the area, but halted myself when I noticed a beautiful grey and white cat sitting several feet behind her next to a tree. She told me that was her cat and it was named "Shadow."

Shadow was not one of my usual feline acquaintances on this residential walking tour, so I asked if she was friendly. Her owner said that she was bothering she and her friend earlier, but she had exiled her to the spot next to the tree. I wished she and her companion luck with her workout, and as I went on my way, she said, "You're doing good," in reference to my constitutional. I replied that I was not doing as well as she and her friend, who looked fitter than me by far.

A Star

She looked down at the umbrella dangling from my left wrist and asked, “Is it going to rain?” It was a silly question because everybody knows that it never rains in California in the summer. I told her that it was for the sun, not for the rain. She looked perplexed and then slightly vexed.

Her last name was “Star”, and she was renting the house in which we’d just completed a month of cat-sitting. My husband and I were temporarily residing in a sprawling Bay Area home for the cost of scooping out a litter box on a daily basis and forcing allergy pills down one cat’s throat daily. It was a good deal for us, less so for the cat

The Star and her husband were forking over thousands of dollars for their summer there in addition to doing cat duty. They had something or other to do with Stanford University and surely she felt smart enough to know that an umbrella on a sunny California day did not mean rain. To her, I was just a delivery person who was diverting her from the process of moving into her temporary home and embarrassing her with my parasol.

To end her discomfort, I offered her the key that I’d just walked a little over 40 minutes in the cruel sun to deliver. She took it from my hand with a terse smile that showed a sense of relief that this brief social altercation would soon be over and then she bid me farewell. The door was closed nearly in my face and I turned to walk home. At the end of the walk, when the shade ran out, I opened my black umbrella and emerged into the light of the star-less day.