Jackie Bird

A few days ago while Yaya was clearing the ceiling of dust and cobwebs, a tiny baby bird fell to the floor. She surmised it must have fallen from the ceiling. It had one bad leg. LP scooped it up right away and had Yaya set it on a basket cushioned with an old potholder.




(It looks dead, but it's not. Pardon the grainy pic, I left my Cybershot in the office and had to make do with my camera phone.)

That evening, LP showed it to me and announced that she was going to call her (or him, can't really be sure) Jackie. Call it maternal instinct, but she knew how to take care of that bird. Quite easy, actually. Since it couldn't fly, it just stayed there in the basket. And even if we laid it down on a level surface, it couldn't walk very far either because of its bad leg.

Feeding Jackie was easy, two or three grains of (moistened) rice and that was it. Once she starts chirping, that's when you start feeding her. (It was fun to see her open her mouth so widely for her next grain of rice.) Oh, so low-maintenance.

Last night, though, LP met us at the gate with Jackie in her hand. "Mommy, Jackie's dead," she said.

"Are you sure?" I asked, because it still looked alive to me.

"Yeah, Mom, she stopped eating already and her eyes are closed," she replied, stroking Jackie's head.

"OK, Sweetie, let's bury her and say a few prayers for her," I told her. I went to the flower box and dug up a small hole for Jackie. LP says one Our Father and then whispers her own improv prayer.

Though she didn't look terribly upset, she started asking questions about where Jackie will be going, and that she felt responsible for her death because she had fed the bird cracker crumbs instead of rice moistened with water. I told her Jackie's on her way to heaven, to which she replied tearfully, "But she's going to have such a hard time getting there because she doesn't know how to fly! She has no mommy to teach her how to fly! What if her mommy gets mad at me for letting her die?!?!"

By this time she's really crying. Not bawling, just really upset-over-death crying. I realize this is the first time she cried over a pet. (Her pet dogs don't like her too much, she's not exactly gentle and affectionate towards them. Quite violent, actually, which deserves another post.)

So I explained to her that Jackie won't have to fly all the way to heaven because God will scoop her up himself, and that Jackie's mom wouldn't be angry at all because LP had become Jackie's second mommy and that Jackie had been well taken care of and fed for.

LP cried some more and asked some more philosophical questions that I knew she would just have to ponder on by herself. And my beef stroganoff was getting cold. So I had her sit on my lap while she was sobbing away.