Falling Bird
By Callie Feyen
@calliefeyen
In any school I’ve ever taught in, once “Back to School Teacher In-Service Week” comes around, the first thing they tell us is to have a schedule up and ready for our students. Because every one of them want to know two things when they cross that threshold into the classroom:
What will I do here?
Where do I belong?
I began with simple directions for board work: 1-2 response questions from the reading the night before. Sometimes I gave them creative writing prompts. Once, I gave them each two tablespoons of Playdough and a piece of paper to list all of the things they could make with the small amount they were given. (Can you guess where I was going with this? I was brilliant once, I’m telling you.)
In January, for a “Welcome Back” present, I handed out blank seating charts and let the students DIY-it-up, and as long as their seating plan was reasonable, that was the seating arrangement for a week (a true teaching hack—this saved me hours every 3-4 weeks).
At the heart though, these two questions are matters of safety. Am I safe here? Am I safe to be who I am? Am I safe to become someone different? Am I safe to change my mind? To grow? To struggle? To question?
Am I safe?
I want to say, yes. Yes, of course you are safe. But the truth is, I don’t know.
***
Sometime between the school shootings and the grocery store one too, sometime before or after Roe v. Wade, and the trials of January 6, I found a new-to-me coffee shop to write in. It’s a grocery store called Argus that only sells local farm products. One part of the store has long, wide tables, and the coffee is served in mugs, and they don’t grind the beans until you order them.
I try to stop there on my way home from work, to get about an hour’s worth of writing done before I go home, though I haven’t been so successful. My mind is crowded. My heart is heavy. My soul is tired. Actually, every part of who I am is exhausted. The other day at work, I overheard someone talking about me: “Callie’s really sweet. She’s really kind. But she’s new. She doesn’t know. You have to tell her everything.”
I’m so tired of hearing I am really sweet and really kind. I’m so tired of being new. I’m almost 47 years old. I should not be new anymore.
I keep trying to write, though, and on the day I stepped out of my car and walked down the sidewalk toward Argus, the sun was out and it wasn’t too hot, and I liked the outfit I was wearing, and the heels I had on for the last 8 hours still felt good, and I was beginning to relax into the writing I hoped to be doing soon. It was all very Disney-like when all of a sudden a bird flew past me and slammed into a closed window.
The bird’s cry of shock is something I can’t get out of my head. I’ve never heard a bird—or anything really—make that sound. It was a percussion of grief and pain, anguish and lament, and then she crashed to the ground, and I heard that, too. I’m not sure what is more horrifying—seeing a body get hurt, or hearing the sounds it makes when it’s happening.
“What happened? Are you OK?” This from a college student sitting on the porch of the house the bird flew into. “I saw your face and heard you—” She stood up and walked toward the stairs. She had on cut-offs Birkenstocks, a Michigan t-shirt that was cropped, and I couldn’t tell if she cropped it, or bought it that way. Her blond hair was perfectly undone in a claw clip. Later, I imagined she would shake her hair out, pull on high-waisted jeans with rips in them, trade out her college shirt for a tank top and head to The Blue Leprechaun.
She’d been sitting at a table with thick textbooks splayed out and there were notebooks and highlighters and I wanted to ask her what she was studying—what it was she would become—and I wanted to ask her how she got that table outside because clearly it was meant to be inside and how clever to make a study area on the front porch. I wanted to tell her about my senior year of college, when my friend Alison and I wanted to move a table from the living room into our kitchen but it wouldn’t fit through the doors of the other rooms so we took it outside and around the house to the backdoor and brought it in that way. We were laughing so hard, and we were so proud of ourselves—this girl who would be a doctor in residence working in the ER in Lancaster, Pennsylvania at the time of the Amish schoolhouse shooting; this girl who would be in an Indiana classroom facing 7th graders when the two towers fell. We were delighted with our homemaking prowess and Alison put a candle on a small plate and set it on the table. “For late nights when we’re studying,” she said. “And early mornings,” I said and we walked to the living room, turned on the TV to watch “Ricki Lake,” but probably it was “Jerry Springer,” except all the channels were covering Princess Diana’s death.
“I had no idea,” Alison said.
“Me neither,” I whispered, and we sat still on the couch, watching.
“A bird,” I said to the college girl. “It hit your window and fell.” I pointed to the bushes in her front yard and there the bird was, face down—not moving, not crying—its blue and brown wings were spread out as if she were soaring.
The girl looked and saw the bird and then looked at me. “You didn’t make that sound,” she said.
“No,” I said.
“That sound came from the bird.”
“Yes,” I said.
She looked at me like I should know what to do—she in her t-shirt and cut-offs learning about the world on her front porch and I standing in it: my dress, my heels, my wedding ring, my dark and puffy under eye circles, my graying hair all probably suggesting I know exactly what to do, that I’ve heard this cry before.
“I have to go,” I said.
“OK,” she said.
She walked back to her table, and I walked away.
***
The last full school year I taught, the school hired a new Head of School, who’d recently moved to the DC area. On his first day, he stood in front of us and showed us a photo of an eagle’s nest he and his wife found on a walk near their home. I’d never seen an eagle’s nest. It was huge—like Big Bird’s—and our principal told us he and his wife walk by it every night to see it.
He was supposed to talk to us about classroom management. We were supposed to discuss lunch duty, carpool and bus procedures. We needed to know when and how to bring our classes to the library.
“When will your students experience beauty in your classroom?” is what he asked us instead, and I wrote the question down and added it to my lesson plan template that year.
When will our children experience beauty? When will the politicians and the police? When will the custodians and the administrative assistants? What about the baristas and bartenders? What about us? When will we experience beauty? Will we know it when we do? And what happens then?
***
“I am stressed out!” I yell to Jesse while tearing through our house. “I don’t like it!” I yell again and then slam the front door. This is how I say goodbye to him on my way to work. I will text him later and apologize. I will say I’m being pulled in 4,000 different directions—work and writing and church and Hadley’s learning to drive and also on the cross-country team and the soccer team, and she’s in the marching band and the regular band, too. Harper is in dance and swim and for some reason decided to quit piano so she could learn the French Horn, which has to be the most difficult instrument ever created, and then there are all the shootings, and what do I think about Roe v. Wade, and should I say something on social media about it all, and there’s also January 6 and aren’t we still in a pandemic? I don’t know anymore. I don’t know anything. I am crumbling. I’m afraid I have no tolerance, no empathy, no capability for anything anymore, and I am driving faster and faster until I see red flashing lights in front of me, and a red stop sign flips out of a yellow school bus.
About 10 of us drivers gather behind the bus, and then 15, and then 20, and soon I’ve lost count but there are a lot of us stopped on our way to work a few minutes before 8 in the morning.
The bus’s lights continue to flash, parents stay where they are on the sidewalk and wait. One parent steps forward and peeks inside, then backs up, turns to the group of parents and says something. A mom runs into the apartment complex beyond the bus, and comes back out waving what looks like a worksheet—some piece of homework, or perhaps a permission slip for a field trip—and she hops on the bus.
We all still wait, and soon it’s clear the issue has not been solved. It’s probably been five minutes, all of us will most likely be late to work. Or maybe we’re going to the grocery store. Maybe we have young kids in the car, and we’re on the way to the park or the zoo. Maybe we are going to the hospital for treatment, to court for a divorce, to visit a sick friend, parent, cousin. We are all leaving home. We are all trying to get home.
Not one of us honks our horns. Nobody rolls down the window and yells, “Hurry the ‘f’ up! What’s your problem?!?” because no one in their right mind would do that when the mama gets off the bus with her boy, holding his hand, and leading him down the sidewalk.
Perhaps it is the school bus that puts us in our right minds, if only for a moment. Perhaps it is this giant yellow monster roaring through the neighborhood that brings a sense of community and a belief in nurturing and protecting humankind.
***
I walked out of Argus, not having written a word except for, “Today I saw a bird fly into a window, and I heard it cry, and I don’t think I’ll ever write again.” By then it was evening, and the sun was heavy with gold, and I heard the college girl say, “Hey! Hey!” and she ran down her front steps when she saw me.
“The bird!” she said. “She’s moving! She’s alive!”
“She is?” I asked, shading my eyes with my hands because the sun was so bright.
“Yes!” she said. “I think she’s going to be OK!”
“That’s great,” I said. “This is great news,” and I waved, and then walked toward home, trying to step lightly so my heels wouldn’t click-clack on the sidewalk and I might hear the flutter of wings; the sound of effort.
Callie Feyen lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan with her husband, Jesse, and their two daughters, Hadley and Harper. She's written two books: Twirl: My Life in Stories, Writing, & Clothes, and The Teacher Diaries: Romeo and Juliet, both published by TS Poetry Press, and she has essays in Coffee + Crumbs' Magic of Motherhood book. Callie holds an MFA in creative writing from Seattle Pacific University.