I've been pretty down of late, as I look at the state of the world. Here and there, though, there are still a few signs of the positive--maybe it's not exactly winning, but at least it persists in the face of negativity from every side.
My friend Dolly, now a cane-wielding elder living in a local HUD building told me this story, and I thought I'd share it. Her apartment building, between HUD and various ill-organized and underfunded landlords, has been undergoing a much-needed upgrading of facilities. The end results are fine, but the long drawn out process of waiting every day for "the workmen to come" --ones who rarely if ever do show--has been going on for over a year now. Some of these tenants are on oxygen, some use walkers and wheelchairs to get around, some are mentally challenged. Only a very few have access to transportation. The long waits between one improvement and the next are punctuated by bursts of frantic activity and huge amounts of noise, usually beginning around 6 a.m. with no notice. This uncoordinated rehab has frayed the tenants' sanity--and some of them are already a bit short on that commodity. Added stress is not welcome in a community of the disabled.
On her little balcony Dolly once looked down up a small green space with a few trees, a bench, and a flower bed with a geranium in summer and daffodils in spring. The local community, in its wisdom, just turned that into an acre of concrete--a new downtown shopping mall with parking for visitors. This too is unfinished, and it contributes to the construction site ambiance around the building. On that balcony, she had a basket from last year still hung, and as the weather warmed, she noticed that a pair of purple finches were cheerfully building a nest there, now that there was nowhere else in their neighborhood.
Dolly was delighted--but terrified, too--because workmen were supposed to sandblast her balcony and install some new screens and she really had no idea when that might happen. So now she worried about the tiny birds, singing so happily just outside her window, oblivious to the noise of construction and traffic far below. Her heart yearned over these bright innocents; she wanted them to be successful, happy parents and to keep singing, but now she feared that like a lot of things she'd seen in life, the end would not be happy.
The Mrs. and her Mister.
When she began to tell about the birds over the phone yesterday, I could feel my guts clench with unhappy anticipation. She said that the finches had laid eggs and were sitting on them when the sandblast guys arrived. Dolly met them at the door in a panic, begging them to "be careful of my poor birds." She drew a deep breath and then said: "But you know what? Those men were so good! They covered everything, and they were so careful of the nest and got it all done quickly."
"All that noise and commotion!"
"Well of course the parents left."
"Poor things; they had no choice."
"Yes, but I couldn't believe it; they came back!"
"OMG! They persisted!"
"That's right, it was just like that. I couldn't believe it either. On Wednesday morning, when I looked out, there were four baby birds, little heads sticking up. The parents have been coming and going all the time to feed them."
Whew! At least for now--a happy ending.
But I should add another paragraph to this story. These kind workmen are itinerant labor, men who work far away from their homes just to collect a $12/hr. paycheck. These guys took the time to listen to a little old lady who must have looked about half crazy when she met them at the door. Even more, they went out of their way to be helpful to these "insignificant" fellow creatures by protecting that nest.
Bless 'em, I say, for their decency to a tender-hearted elder and to those little bitty birds.
~~Juliet Waldron
