One blindingly bright Tucson morning,
while riding passenger
in my grandmother’s boat of a Mercury wagon,
she navigated us down North Oracle road.
My eyes had been entranced on the Catalina foothills,
where I stared up and out,
my vision blurred by motion,
she broke through my glaze when she cried out:
“Oh no! Oh dear, dear, dear!”
Her exclamation became fast tears,
as she gestured to my window side
and at a little Gambel’s quail running back and forth
in front of the body of another quail,
this one with deeper, brighter markings,
lain deflated, his ruddy head and ebony top knot limp
on the scorching asphalt,
the victim of some car’s unseeing tires.
I crane my neck backwards
to glimpse the survivor,
tawny and muted grey,
fretting over her partner,
growing smaller in the distance,
while my grandma continues:
“Oh no oh no oh no!
Quails mate for life!
What will she do?!
The poor dear she’s all alone!”
At that last outburst,
Grandma bawled openly,
an ever-ready Kleenex slipped
from quilted cotton handbag
and lifted to her face,
her nose and eyes reddened,
lines stretching across her crepey,
anguished face.
My Grandma felt things, deeply.
What I’m trying to say is,
she had more empathy for a strange bird
than most people have
for other humans on this planet.
She saw love and companionship
and dedication and tragedy and loss and,
upon taking in the visibly bereft feathered lady,
it was too much to bear.
And this evidence that life is swift and cruel
and dangerous eroded at the heart
of a Midwestern gal who,
decades and states removed,
still maintained her lifelong loyalty
to Ford Motor Company
and a constant void
in the shape of her baby brother,
who never made it home from war.
She was a mystic,
though not so much a seer
as she was a feeler.
What I’m trying to say is,
she saw herself in that hen.
And that weight
of being so deeply tapped into
the pulse of this earth,
into the vibrations of joy and pain
and fear and pleasure and hardship,
was a burden and a blessing for her.
Without words,
her eyes flit and widened,
and I knew she was imagining her own husband,
my Grandpa,
bright and broad and magnificent,
felled on the roadway,
left for dead by an indifferent human
with somewhere to be.
She saw herself
running back and forth on the shoulder,
her platinum front curl bobbing
with the jerky adrenaline of panic.
She saw her family
and her neighbors
and her world
and she couldn’t keep that bird safe
just like she cant keep any of us safe.
The layers of emotions
she carried right at the surface,
accessible, with her everywhere she went,
like her big duffle purse with scissors
and note pads, plural,
and a Sharpie, fine,
and a box of Fisherman’s Friend throat lozenges
or her inhaler,
all her tools for making it through this life
ready to go at a moment’s notice
to attend to the ills and surprises of the world.
A quarter century it’s been
since that moment
on a blazing switchback.
On nights like this, or rather,
this darkness of early morning,
I can’t sleep and my thoughts race
like quails in single file
across a lava river of tar and man’s making.
I am not quite sure I’ll make it
to the other side of the road intact.
I can still hear my Grandma’s scream
and feel the pressure in the cabin shift
as her tears went airborne.
And now,
in the overcast hush
of a murky East Coast moon,
where the clouds feel
like cotton batting settling over the forest,
I too carry that grief,
her grief,
that loss,
her loss,
for the young chap
who got checked
by a careless Arizonan
in front of us so long ago.
Check, mate.
