(or, “The Yellow Sparrow”)
The briskly, yellow sparrow had not been born in Mr. Evens’ garden like so many other of the sparrows that patronized his little patch of land he personally made for them, but he was there as if he had been, and perhaps lingered about more so than many of the other forty sparrows and doves that lived there, or thought they lived there, and the old man, thought it was about time for the one and only Yellow Sparrow to eat something, I mean he had been there going on eighteen months, God forbid, he came and he left and he never ate. I mean, here was a small house garden, with no roof to enclose them, so they could come freely to and fro and even go over to the nearby park and when hungry and thirsty, come back for fresh water in a clean ceramic container, five weekly cleaned out birdhouses that they seemed to go in and out of like a busy metropolis, and all the fast food you could eat—the best seeds this side of Alaska, all the greenery, tall and short, a bird could play in, and a clean—weekly cleaned out, freshly watered birdbath one could swim in or just float, take a bath or shower anytime of the day, and no crows, or pigeons to eat you up in-between, and he wanted to know, why he came only to take a bath, and chitchat with his fellow birds.
I mean the bird always smiled, and for a bird to smile it was difficult, with those short faces and tiny beaks, but they can: they puff up those side cheeks, and curve up those muscles under their eyes, and those feathers appear to squeeze together, and that is their smile, in a nutshell.
But let me describe him and his tiptoeing to the birdbath: first of all he’s (I think he is a he—he could be a she) a clutching little fat yellow breasted sparrow (perhaps more wide than fat), when I say clutching, I mean he hangs onto things tightly—(perhaps all birds do) or at least he appears to, as onto the branches of the greenery in the garden, or onto the edge of the birdbath, and so forth, tightly. After his bath, he flaps those little wings to adjust whatever he’s adjusting, rigorously, and like a little wrench tightening himself up, tidy like, he’s got to be the cleanest sparrow this side of the Gulf of Mexico, and I’m in Lima, Peru. Furthermore, who is ever around, this yellow bird when he takes a bath, gets a shower free, as he briskly dries those wings of his off; funny, every sparrow around seems to automatically create a distance from him, after his birdbath, and many during his bath. But I’m not absented-minded, the premise of this story is, “Why does he not eat?”
We all have our own ideas of why this is one way and why something else is that way, and I’ve come to my conclusion of why the Yellow Sparrow does what he does, or in this case doesn’t do, what I think he should do, meaning ‘eat,’ perhaps the only one conclusion I could come up with that makes any sense to me: there are not only two kinds of sparrows in the world, such as to say, those everlasting hungry sparrows who seem to eat and fly and play about constantly, or the sparrows who like to find a peaceful place to chitchat, live and sleep— there is a third kind, a select kind, one who could careless about the peacefulness or the availability of food, he is the Yellow Sparrow kind, he is the third kind, the one I could never have told you about unless I saw it with my own eyes, the birdbath sparrow, the addicted sparrow to cleanliness (like my wife, Rosa), instead of all that other stuff—which I ‘m sure he likes the peacefulness of the garden, and perhaps when I’m not around he may find a seed or two to eat on the ground, but I’m convinced, if you gave him the choice, he’d pick that birdbath every time over eating or sleeping.
No 706/ (11-01-2010)
Dedicated to the Yellow Sparrow, Rosa Peñaloza and Enrique H.
