Day 3 – To Kill a Mockingbird

Posted on Aug 4th, 2010 | 5 comments

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or NOT. Killing a mockingbird is NEVER an option for me.

Initially, I assumed the high point of Day 3 would be enrolling my grandson, Kendall in his first year in high school. Sophmore. Whooda thought either of us would’ve survived to see this event?! I was going to take his picture outside the front doors but he said he would feel like a dweeb. By the time we left there were so many other people there I’d have felt like a dweeb too. Not that that would’ve stopped me. When you’re a teenager, the world revolves around what other kids think. When you’re over 50, you don’t give much of a rat’s ass what ANYone thinks.

Kendall was bumped out of top spot as the event of the day by a tiny baby mockingbird stranded in the middle of the road on the way to the school. 2 other baby birds which appeared to be his siblings were already squashed…he was the lone survivor of whatever madness and mayhem had knocked them out of their nest prematurely. I had other more pressing and important things to do, but I simply could not leave that baby bird in the road to be squashed like his siblings. Besides, the mockingbird is my totem animal. To have left him there to die would not only have seared my conscience and caused me unbearable pain, but would’ve been a dreadful omen as well, considering the aforementioned fact.

I came to this realization years ago (that the mockingbird is my ‘totem’). My first mockingbird fell out of its nest when I was 20 and living with my daughter’s father (I use that term quite loosely). It was just a few months before I became pregnant with her. He was the first of a total of (now, including Atticus, toDAY’s rescue) 5 baby mockingbird rescues. When they have come into my life, they have always been about the same age…about half fledged. The real kicker is that every single time I have rescued one of these babies, their appearance in my life has ALWAYS preceded some monumental change and shift in the direction of my life.

Frequent appearances are not just with the babies either. There was a period of about 3 years (following my last baby mockingbird rescue) during which it was as if these things had taken it upon their species to be my guardian angels. Mockingbirds were EVERYwhere that I went…ALL the time. And I’m not talking about being at a distance, they would come right up to me, close enough to feel my breath! They would follow me from the office to my vehicle every evening, and follow me from the parking lot to the door the next morning. One morning, a mocking bird landed on the back of my truck as I pulled into my parking spot at work, right behind my door, and didn’t as much as FLINCH when I got out of the truck and closed the door. And yes, it proceeded to follow me from tree to tree to sign to tree, all the way to the office door.

I had my mom out running errands one day and was sharing with her how mockingbirds had become my constant companions. As I was telling her the story, we were sitting in the parking lot at Hardee’s eating breakfast biscuits, being serenaded by, you guessed it, a mockingbird in a tree right next to the car. And as usual, for the rest of the day, mockingbirds were everywhere we went…sitting on parking signs in the parking spaces we parked in, on the sidewalk in front of the store doors, singing in nearby trees. My mother was completely taken aback by such a vivid, day long demonstration of my earlier claims, saying she would never have believed it to be so over the top if she had not seen it happening ALL DAY, herself.

I could share story after story like these, and it’s been going on for YEARS. There are periods where such sightings are much more frequent than at other times, but mockingbirds are never far from me, either in body or in spirit. You just cannot convince me there is not something supernatural about these sort of appearances. If this most recent appearance of a baby mockingbird continues in keeping with those past, this could be a portent of some radical change in my life. I’m not sure whether to be excited or scared.

His name is Atticus.

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