Yesterday, walking toward my building at work, I saw a little bird huddled on the sidewalk in the early morning rain. It was a tiny thing, and didn’t seem to be able to fly. I thought it had fallen out of its nest and that maybe a mother would be along soon to collect it, but there’s a lot of foot traffic into the building, so I stood over it for a few minutes, warning people away.
“Watch out for this little bird,” I told a retired lieutenant-colonel, and he looked at me and then the bird and then back at me as he went by.
Later, after a morning meeting, I went for a walk with my daughter, who works on the same Army base. The rain had ended. The little bird was gone by then, and I don’t know if its mother collected it or if it found the strength to fly away, but this morning I like to think both. That the mother found it and coaxed it skyward with the bird equivalent of “You’ve got this. You can do this shit. Get up there and fly, big boy.”
I find myself more sentimental these days. Walking with my daughter on cool summer mornings makes me think about the passing of time. How old I am. How much longer I’ll be able to look out for my little girls, who are not little anymore but will always be little birds huddled in the rain to me.
So of course we come across a dying moth this morning, after the bird. It’s bigger than the bird, this moth, dull orange, with dull brown markings on its heavy wet wings. I do not know if its wings got wet in the rain but as we came along it was flapping and flopping along the sidewalk, trying to fly. It beat its wings so hard against the sidewalk I thought it would injure them, so we stopped and I grabbed a stick and tried to get the moth to grab onto it. My plan was to lift it into the air where it could flap its wings to dry them and then fly away.
But the moth wasn’t strong enough to grasp the stick, or it didn’t know what was in my heart. It kept scraping its wings against the sidewalk instead of grabbing the stick, doing more harm than good, so I scooped it up gently and set it on the grass, where it, at least, quit beating its wings.
After a rain there are always worms washed up on the sidewalk. On our way back to the building, past the moth and where I saw the little bird, my daughter stopped to scoop a worm back on the grass, and afterward I put my arm around her and she leaned her head on my shoulder as if she’d always love me.
That afternoon I took the back way home, a small state highway that runs through intermittent fields of Kansas corn. The clouds were still gray, rain threatening. Running parallel to a corn patch I saw something above the cornstalks. I would later realize they were horns, but at the moment I had no idea, until the big buck burst out of the corn and crossed the road just inches in front of me. I had instinctively slowed down when I saw the horns, so I slammed the brakes in just enough time to miss the deer.
Still, it was enough to get the old heart rate up, considering how often I see deer dead on the side of the road. And it was enough to make me think about mortality again, the shuffling off of this mortal shell. I think about what I want from life. How I want to be remembered and what I keep coming back to is that all I want in this world is for us to stand beside each other when we can’t get up out of the rain. When we don’t feel like we can fly or we need a helping hand or we’re stuck under an indifferent sun on the sidewalk of life.
It’s Friday morning, friends, August 7, 2026. And more than anything on this day I hope you have someone standing beside you when you’re huddled in the rain. I hope your crossings are clear when you come out of the corn. I hope you can dry your wings and fly, I hope the rain doesn’t leave you high and dry, I hope you have someone you love like a daughter to put your arm around.
I hope, friends. I hope.
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