Private Lives: Personal essays on the news of the world and the news of our lives.
I haven’t sent my father’s watch to be fixed since his death six months ago. I am scared to let it out of my grasp. For 45 years it circled his wrist: a silver-faced Accutron with a tuning-fork movement that I could hear humming when I brought Dad’s warm arm up to my ear. Its face tells me it stopped at 4:04 on the 27th. My father stopped at 6:04 on the 30th.
At 1:34 on the 15th, two weeks before, I left the apartment in which he and my mother were staying for the duration of his medical treatment. The treatment had ended, and he was in hospice care there. Our small family had rallied around him over the previous year: He was unquestionably the sun we had always circled. His grueling work ethic became our work ethic; his effusive and biting humor, our humor. As a litigator, often working 100-hour weeks, he viewed his terminal diagnosis as his next “case”; we were his “team.” We could brainstorm with him on the case, but he would decide how to proceed.
I had maintained this fiction, treating his case as pressing but not a crisis, visiting him almost daily but not keeping constant vigil. I brought treatment ideas, consolations, stories from my days and nourishment, when he could still take nourishment. But I would then leave, too — and I waltzed out that day as though there would still be further stages in his case after hospice. With Dad in charge, we would conquer this thing, have a laugh about it, and each of us would then move, emboldened, on to the next adventure. The emergency that was his imminent death had become normal.
Outside, the normal became an emergency. Halfway down the block, a pigeon was struggling to lift himself from behind a steel driveway fence, which had swung open, trapping him between the fence and a brick wall. I am an animal behavior researcher, constitutionally and professionally interested in animals, and so I stopped. I would save the bird. No matter that the species I know is dogs, not birds; or that I research behavior from a safe, observer’s distance, instead of being in the practice of putting broken animals back together. No matter that there must be tens of thousands of pigeons in New York City with their own handicaps or maladies. I approached my pigeon. He was able neither to turn to the side nor to launch himself skyward. I gently pushed my hand through his flailing wings and palmed him.
You might not think of holding a pigeon in your hand. But they are very satisfying to hold — their ovoid bodies full yet impossibly light. I smoothed his wings along his body, murmuring at him as though my cooing might comfort him. I held this pigeon just long enough to move him to the other side of the fence, thinking that maybe then he could fly off. He renewed his attempt, his wings fluttering. I spied a gash on his back and noticed, suddenly, the paralysis of his legs. He could not lift himself.
I had to move him to safety. I picked him up again, cradling him as I walked down the long avenue and into the park. His heart beat rapidly against my fingertips. He again tried and failed to fly. I could leave him there, I thought. Maybe he would recover, maybe he would die, but better to die on a bed of grass than on the cold concrete.
I turned to leave. I couldn’t let my day be hijacked by an injured pigeon. Then my stomach somersaulted. I could not leave him, could not walk off and let him die, having felt his heartbeat in my hand. I remembered the wild bird hospital.
I dug a Barneys paper bag out of a park trash can and placed him inside. A taxi brought us uptown. Within a half-hour I handed him over to the bird doctors, with the fullest confidence that all that could be done, would be.
The vets named him Alex. He was placed on a heating pad and medicated; his dog bite was gently cleaned. Around me were hundreds of birds: a recovering goose, myriad pigeons and ducks, two shipshape sea gulls walking around in the small lobby. I took my leave when a man arrived with a swan noisily objecting to its kidnapping. I promised to return.
Some days later I arrived at my office to find a young starling caught between two window panes, easy to fall into but impossible to fly out of. 12:54. By 12:55 I was tearing the office apart looking for a spoon, stick or probe with which to scoop him out; tools with which to remove the air-conditioner, bolted to the window frame; something with which to smash the glass window should I need to. I finally ripped the air-conditioner out of the wall, yanked the window from its painted moorings, and slipped the bird free with my fingers. Again, the bird hospital. This time they armed me with a small container of worms and sent me back to where I found him. I released him four stories down from his capture, and watched him for two hours until he got his wits about him and began pecking at the worms and the ground.
Then springtime bloomed, and I panicked. Spring meant baby birds were fledging, and they were everywhere on the ground: tiny, barely feathered, hopping along without concern. They did not move away when I approached them, as the experienced, professional city birds do — nor when my dogs approached, pursuing the small movement along the ground that dog eyes are tuned to spot. I worried. I began to see fledglings everywhere: on the sidewalk, in gutters, on bike paths. One afternoon I stood guard for hours around a pile of wood chips in the park camouflaging young, feckless sparrows new to this world.
I checked on all the birds daily. After a few days of warm care, Alex died. But the starling found his way. The sparrows grew up. I accept these facts with a measure of satisfaction: With the birds I maintained the illusion that I might control some element of the cycle of life. I could materially change their fates, or, at least, the circumstances in which they met their fates. With my father, I was only a witness. His body might or might not pull through, for a day or a year. What I could not tear into or change in any way was that he was at risk: the essential person, the thing that mattered. And when I waltzed back into his apartment early one morning, he had flown away.
I now wear his watch, warming it with my arm. Its hands will not move and its heart will not hum. But there it is, around my wrist as it was around his, girding me with the impulse to keep working the case, even if it cannot be won.
Alexandra Horowitz is the author of “Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know” and “On Looking: A Walker’s Guide to the Art of Observation.”