Dear Mrs. Campbell:
It may help you remember me if I tell you that I was the boy in your fourth grade class who addressed my Christmas card to Mrs. Camel. Sorry about that. I was also president of the Junior Audubon Society, which we called the bird club for short. It was the first time I was president of anything. I found I liked holding titles that didn't require much work. I'm not proud of it. More important, I learned to be aware of birds and to appreciate them.
I remember the first unusual bird I saw that fourth grade year. I was on my way home from school and in the snow on Sixth Street was a scarlet tanager and I stopped and wondered how anything so beautiful could be dead. Sadly, I've learned. But I have never seen another scarlet tanager.
I thought you might enjoy some other bird stories.
On the way home from a North Carolina beach a few years ago, my wife and I and some friends stopped overnight in Hendersonville. On Sunday morning we attended the early service at St. James Episcopal Church before starting home.
After the service we were walking to our car in the parking lot when a bird -
I can't tell you what kind; I know a former president of the bird club should be able to, but I can't -
landed at the peak of the parish house roof and began to sing. He was a little bird, but he had a powerful voice, and a song so beautiful that everybody stopped, watched and listened until he finished and flew away.
When I think of that bird's song, I remember some lines from Thomas Merton: "The rain ceases and a bird's clear song suddenly announces the difference between heaven and hell." I believe I have that right.
Years ago I edited some short articles written by a priest who had been chaplain in a psychiatric hospital. One day during a service, a bird somehow got into the chapel and couldn't find its way out. Despite efforts to shoo it toward freedom, it continued to fly about - banging into things and causing some unease among the patients. Then one of them stood up, lifted his hand, said "Bird!" and the bird landed on his hand and allowed itself to be taken outside.
And one more bird story, a very old one, told by The Venerable Bede in his "The Ecclesiastical History of the English People" -
it may explain why some of us worship as we do today. In seventh-century Northumbria King Edwin called a meeting of friends and advisors to decide if Christian missionaries should be allowed to preach in his domain. The chief among his advisors recommended that Edwin follow Christian teaching, and then another said:
"The present life of man upon earth, O King, seems to me in comparison with that time which is unknown to us like the swift flight of a sparrow through mead-hall where you sit at supper in winter, with your Ealdormen and thanes, while the fire blazes in the midst and the hall is warmed, but the wintry storms of rain or snow are raging abroad. The sparrow, flying in at one door and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry tempest, but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, passing from winter to winter again. So this life of man appears for a little while, but of what is to follow or what went before we know nothing at all. If, therefore, this new doctrine tells us something more certain, it seems justly to be followed in our kingdom."
Well, you know much better than I what life is like beyond the mead hall.
Thanks for all you taught me, including the difference between Campbell and Camel. Hope to see you later.
Sincerely,
Robert (not president of anything)