Learning To Fly
Her name is Mitzi. I like that name, with its sparkling side and esoteric side and even ethnic side, although that doesn't really play a part here. I just like the sound of it.
Mitzi is wary of me. She cocks her ears, in a way, when I approach. If I get too close, or am too loud or disruptive, she runs, just flies away to a safe spot to observe me. She's very young, but she knows things, and knows about danger. She doesn't trust me. I don't blame her. I can look dangerous at times.
It's all an act, though. I'm as dangerous as a gerbil. But Mitzi has her guard up just the same.
So I tiptoe around Mitzi. My family thinks this is hilarious. They think...I don't know what they think. That I'm being dumb, or sentimental, or maternal. My feminine side is coming out, or something.
I knew another Mitzi, once, a long time ago in a place far, far away. We were in high school, and she was a year younger, and she hated me. Despised me, thought I was arrogant and obnoxious. Probably true; I have trouble remembering sometimes.
But one day she un-hemmed me. She thought my jeans, my Levis, needed a frayed, contemporary, 1970s look, so she took out the hems, knelt at my feet and adjusted my jeans, and somehow she taught me most of what I know about men and women.
Which is, we can be friends without the other stuff. The hormonal stuff, the sexual stuff, the passion and the pride and the awkward stuff. We just became friends, this little wisp of a girl and me. I tried to look after her, her with her troubled family life and issues and such.
Once, a long time ago, I leaned over spontaneously and kissed her on the lips, just a trace of a kiss, and she laughed at me. It made no sense, that kiss, and it meant nothing, as I remember, except that I was in a good mood and I really liked her. Still she laughed.
Years later, she explained it all.
"No one had ever kissed me before," she said.
She married right out of high school, moved to the Pacific Northwest, returned to Arizona in 1979 for a visit and came by my apartment one day in a period when I was flailing, said hello, raised her eyebrows at how miserable I looked, and then left for a long time.
A very long time.
And on July 26, 1996, she left a message on my answering machine.
It was my 38th birthday, coinciding with my 20th high school reunion. I was at a party at a friend's house, a party that ignored my birthday, an already scheduled party, so it was nice to have a surprise. It turned out she'd gone to my reunion (not hers) expecting me to be there, and when I wasn't she called my home phone, 1000 miles away, to find out why.
We talked the next day, a nice talk, reminiscing, talking about life and marriage and hopes and dreams and unexpected kisses. The usual stuff.
It was a nice surprise, hearing from Mitzi, after all these years. My birthday was spent in boredom, listening to engineers and doctors talk about their lives, looking at the bright blue Northwest sky at dusk for most people, thinking that it was my birthday and nobody really cared, wondering about my high school reunion far away. I ended it sitting in the basement, eating shrimp and watching the news of a bomb at the Atlanta Olympics. So the next day's phone call was fun.
I wrote Christmas letters at that time, silly summaries of our lives that got passed around our friends, who speculated that my wife had actually written them (no one knew anything about me). So I sent one, that next December, to Mitzi. With a little note, "let's keep in touch," something.
Her mother called me in January, on a day I had a terrific toothache, telling me she'd read the Christmas letter and wishing me the best for me and my family, and just to let me know that Mitzi was dead.
Dead on a mountain highway, coming back from a church retreat, no more hems to undo, no more phone calls to make.
I went for a drive. I cried a little. I had wished for her something more, something substantial, and here she was a news item, an illogical accident.
I wasn't in such great shape myself. I didn't learn this for a while.
Everything is just so long ago, now.
I know nothing about cultures that sense spirits, that see regeneration and suspect reincarnation, that are other directed and find lost treasures in new discoveries. Nothing, I know nothing.
Cultures that should be familiar, that walk the ground I walk, even. Native American. Indigenous to my sidewalk. I am arrogant and obnoxious sometimes.
But John discovered Mitzi first. He saw the first strands, the wisps. Our garage door opener, long since defunct, has become home to a red-breasted robin with hope.
She perks up when I go in the garage. Sometimes she flies away, particularly when I get in the car. Sometimes she sits and waits.
It's a fine nest. Symmetric.
Yes, I know I'm just being dumb. I know it's foolish to walk softly and worry about cats, to park my car away to avoid a launching pad for predators, to dream that I'll wander out one morning to grab a can of Diet Riet and hear chirps, and believe in life again.
I believe anyway.
I wake up these days, early in the morning, hearing birds singing. And I eventually go to the garage, and wait. She is cautious, and flies from me when she can. She senses I am dangerous. Maybe.
And maybe it's middle age, and maybe it's the pre-grandchildren stage, and maybe it's just stuff. Old guy stuff. Lost passion and love and dreams and memories and reunions and ego and... stuff.
I have named my robin, though. She lives under my eaves and her story is my story, somehow, and I will wait for the eggs to hatch and the excitement and the daddy robin pacing my front yard with his cigar, and I will think of other lives and other possibilities. Just a dumb old guy, peering at nests, remembering and regretting. Pay no attention.
But I will call her Mitzi, now, and she will be mine.
7:24:06 PM 
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