Chapter 18: Birds, Beaks, Bones
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When Myra was 3, she was playing at my parents’ house and found an injured bird laying in the backyard grass. She scooped it up and insisted we take the bird to a “hospital”.
At the time, my photography business was just getting started. I was obsessed. I needed a song for my website. I wanted to write something about the beauty I found us in. How the beauty wasn’t right—my heart never quite at ease in our days, but it wasn’t wrong either.
Myra’s hurt bird—the one she was determined to rescue, the one I was pretty sure wouldn’t make it, but for which the effort at life seemed worthwhile anyway, fit the shape of my inner world.
I wrote the words.
Marty wrote the music on the piano and put the words to a melody.
Would you call this beauty?
The birds in the backyard
It’s hard to leave them alone.
Birds, beaks bones.
This place. This place. This place.
Would you call this beauty?
My nose and my eyebrows,
It’s hard to say—
Depends on the day.
My face. My face. My face.
Blue feathers, no brown.
Red hair, no blonde.
A smile, no a frown.
Good grace, Good grace, Good grace.
We needed the grace so bad. I was grasping for it, sure it had to be there and trying to make out its shape, naming it in hopes the act would help me receive what I couldn't see or sense.
I’m not sure we ever get over what we never let ourselves feel in the first place.
9 months earlier, before we wrote this song, we were in bed. Feet touching. Marty was emotional. Marty was telling me how unhappy he was. Marty was working full time all day for the State of Idaho and going to school at night to get a graduate degree in public health. Wren was a few months old. We were surviving off of $5 pizza. We lived with my parents because we couldn’t afford rent. My father, by then diagnosed with paranoid delusions, believed Marty was having an affair with my mom.