Guthrie Green wasn’t a bird, and this perturbed him greatly.
The first memory that Guthrie had, from a time where memories weren’t something for one to hold on to in their mind, was of gulls floating on the breeze with the whitewashed haze of a coastal break crashing lazily as background noise. He didn’t know how old he was when he recalled it, but he can remember watching the birds as they were almost stationary. They hung on the fingers of a breeze without much effort or strife to keep them that way. And he remembered his mother tickling his nose with one of those seagull feathers which made him laugh and sneeze at the same time.
Sitting here now and watching the finches darting from tree branch to tree branch out of his office window, the memory still makes him smile as he never forgot how that feather tickled. That memory always made him remember that if he could wish to be anything in the world, or if he was given the choice of a thing to be born as, he would have chosen a bird without hesitation
He didn’t share this sentiment of his with many people, as he already struggled to make genuine connections due to his own self imposed but absolutely necessary personality. Or was it his quirks? Some people had described these tenets of his life “his quirks”. He had heard it more than once, and from more than one person. He mostly chose to consider that endearing, but that little voice inside of his head sometimes convinced him that it was just a nice way of calling him too weird to befriend.
He knew he was an oddity. An abstract what-not on the shelves of the passers-by of his life to marvel at and to make incorrect assumptions about as they tried to determine just what it was that made them want to keep him at arms length. Most people preferred to ponder him like a museum artifact rather than experience who he was for themselves. As a result, he had become quite content with keeping himself company. People made him uneasy most of the time. But the birds were the opposite.
He figured that he must have been five or six as he was participating in the old tradition of “show and tell” at school and he distinctly remembered the teacher being Mrs. Albrecht when this particular day was unfolding. He knew that because she had a clock that hung on the wall. Not just any clock. Whenever the hour made its way around to the next one as the day went on, rather than the typical chime that you would expect, there was a bird that would pop out of a tiny door in the face of the clock and “cuckoo” away as it counted the number of the hour. That clock fascinated him, and tied this memory to her. He learned later that the clock was her grandfathers and he had brought it over with him from Germany when her family immigrated to the United States.
That day he had brought a feather to class for his show and tell event. He knew now that it had come from a goose because he had collected quite a few of them over the years at this point. Back then he just knew that it was huge and white and beautiful. He had found it one evening as he hung his bare feet into the cool water of the local lake and it floated up to him on the water asking him to take it home. He took the bright white feather to the front of the class and marveled at it as he demonstrated how gracefully it floated to the floor when he dropped it, or how it magically caught the wind and tried to fly away when he held it in front of the desk fan. He loved that feather, and he wanted his classmates to love it too. Maybe he had, since one of his classmates, Matt Chamberlain, tried to take it from him later in the day as he was waiting for the school bus outside. He broke off the tip of the feather as he shoved Guthrie down to the ground. He laughed when the feather broke as he tossed the broken tip into the breeze. That wasn’t the first time that he wished that he was a bird so that he could’ve flown away. If he had been a bird, his feather wouldn’t have gotten broken.
He opened the old cedar trunk that he kept under the windowsill, and pulled out the broken feather as this memory was playing in his mind like an invisible movie. It still floated to the floor when he let it drop from head height, dancing on the breeze as it slowly meandered to the floor. The finches sang their show tune to this display just outside of his office window. The window was cracked, he always preferred the fresh air to the air conditioning. Besides that, the wind only lives outside, after all.
Inside the chest there were hundreds of other feathers that had come to him at one point or another in his life. There was a story for every one of them, and he remembered them all. He was an old man now, and ever since that first day in his memory of the first one, the broken goose feather, whenever he had found another, it always made its way home with him. Sometimes Guthrie liked to believe that it was the feathers that were finding him.
By the time he had gone to college, there were more than would fit on the cork board that hung above his childhood bed in his room. For a while he would use a thumb tack to pin each one he found to the bulletin board. Eventually they overwhelmed his straight-A report cards that used to hang where the feathers did now, so he took those down in order to add more feathers to his display. It became full within a few short years. He loved looking up at them as a child and imagined that it made his dreams fly higher and sweeter each night as he dozed off with them above his head.
He had begun rotating them out as he found new ones, so some of them got placed carefully in the old cedar steamer chest. They wouldn’t all fit on the board at once as his collection grew. The bulletin board stayed full. He couldn’t bare to part with any of them, since they served as his personal journal. That cork board and steamer trunk had traveled to each place he had ever lived, full of feathers, and full of stories. It was apparently one of his quirks.
He always admired birds and could catalog his life according to the stories that accompanied his collection of their discarded plumage. Each feather was like a personal VHS tape that he could play over and over in his mind simply by holding one of them.
He could remember the day his girlfriend broke up with him. It was a painful memory since it was the first girl that he had ever loved, and the first one who brought him feathers. She knew that Guthrie loved them, and she won his love at the blue tip of the first feather she had brought him. It was a blue jay feather. She said the color reminded her of his eyes. She also said that he was the opposite of a blue jay because she couldn’t imagine him hurting anyone, and blue jays were bullies. The day that she left him, explaining that she was tired of never going to parties or social events because he was too much of an introvert came to him when he held this blue and black feather in his hand. After that he always remembered her as a blue jay since that was a pretty mean thing to say to a “nice guy” like him. She told him that she had put off their departure too long because he was “such a kind hearted person, and it was hard to let him down”. Blue jays are indeed bullies.
Picking up a dove feather, the color of a cloudy sky, he remembered his late wife. When they were married many years after the blue jay’s departure, he knew that he had found the only person that he would ever love again. It’s a feeling that you can only know when it finds you, and its as sure as knowing that you’ll be hungry when you wake up in the morning. On their wedding day, a simple affair in a public park because neither of them had much use for pomp or overpriced baubles, a flock of doves were eating the fallen apples around the base of the old apple tree at the corner of Frederick and 7th. They had picnicked under that tree a hundred times, and they loved how it showed them that spring was near as the tree marked the change of the seasons every year when it blossomed. It was their tree as far as Guthrie was concerned. It was in fact the place where they met.
As the minister finished reading their vows, a car backfired going through the stop sign on 7th startling the doves into a flurry of chirps, tweets, and fallen feathers. As Guthrie embraced Deb on the afternoon of their wedding, watching the doves fly off into the pink sky, he was amazed at her delight as the birds took flight. She opined about how she wishes that they could join them and fly to wherever they were going. He knew it before, but with those words, he was solidly in love with her for the rest of his days. Walking to the apple tree hand in hand, two dove’s feathers were left in their wake. He tucked them into her hair and that was one of the most perfect memories he could conjure.
He kept the feathers that he had collected while Deb was in his life in a separate box. An apple crate from Williams’ Orchard. It seemed appropriate, and it fit inside the steamer chest. As he peered inside recalling the memories from his life in avian form, a stark white feather caught his eye. It was from a swan and he always knew that it had been left behind as a gift. Guthrie and Deb had been hiding from a pelting rain under an awning as they watched a mother swan shield her bevy of younglings from the downpour with her wings. She gracefully stood defiant against the storm and when it finally passed she escorted them into the horizon, unfazed by the deluge that she had just endured. Left in her wake was a singular feather, still dry and pristine. Deb had stood defiantly at his side through their life’s storms for 60 years, escorting him through the best years of his life and their own personal horizons. This feather always reminded him how strong she was.
There was a black crow feather. Holding it he can remember the day that she had brought it to him after chasing the crows from her tomato plants. She was irritated, but still kept the memento of battle by her side, insisting that he add it to the bulletin board to mark her victory against the cawing mob for the day. Later that same week as they hung a thrift store dress and straw hat on their scarecrow that they called Matilda, that same crow feather adorned Matilda’s hat as a flag of warning to the would be vegetable thieves. This feather reminded him that Deb was a warrior.
There was a bright yellow feather the color of a caution sign in there. A warbler had left it as a gift at the base of the suet feeder that Deb kept on the front porch for years. He hung it with pride on his board of memories. It cost the yellow warbler more than the worth of a normal man’s yearly salary, so he saw it as one of the most expensive things that he owned. It always reminded him how Deb was a nurturer.
There was a fiery red feather in there. One evening as Deb came home with tears streaming in her eyes and a garble of words he had finally deduced that on her drive home, she saw the streak of red in her headlights and heard a sickening thud as the poor cardinal had crashed into the grill of her car. Deb had collected the bird in her hands, wrapped it in her jacket and brought it to Guthrie with a hope in her eyes that he could make it right. They held a funeral in the back yard at the base of a mulberry bush the next day for the departed creature. She kept saying how nobody deserved to go like that, and Guthrie explained to her that perhaps it was the bird’s way at making a quick exit at the behest of his grief. Maybe he had lost his mate and was done with flying.
She didn’t call him quirky when he suggested such a thing, and from that day forward she felt like she had performed a service for a grieving bird. That was the story, and there was nothing else to say. She had kept the feather, according to her, to honor his life and to remind her that life was precious and precarious. It held a different memory for Guthrie. This feather always reminded him what a kind heard Deb had.
After Deb had died, he had wished for himself the same quick respite from grief. He longed for his “grill between the headlights” many nights, but he knew that’s not what she would’ve wanted. She wasn’t supposed to go first, and now he was left again with himself and his feathers and his awkwardness and quirks. She understood him, and he hadn’t realized as a child how much he would miss that connection once he had finally found it. Once he was happy to be alone, and had in fact relegated himself to that existence until she walked into his life asking for directions under an apple tree so many years ago. From that moment on, his life was instantly filled with a longing that he held on to even in the present day. A longing that only she could pacify.
As the finches still sang their chaotic melody outside his office window, he watched their erratic dance on the dewy morning lawn. He smiled as he thought of how Deb said that their world just moved a little faster than ours, and if we could slow down their movements to our speed, that we’d see them performing a beautiful waltz as they gracefully pecked the ground for their next meal.
She loved the waltz. He was far too slow these days, and doubted that he could waltz at all. He never really could, but he could pretend with Deb as a record spun on the turntable, filling the room with ancient tunes. No reason to waltz when your partner was gone.
As he stared at the feathers rustling in their old cedar trunk as if they were dancing on the invisible fingers of the morning breeze, and the memories were passing through his mind in quick succession, he wished that he was a bird. He wished that he could fly into the pink afternoon sky where he imagined Deb was looking down at him through lenses colored with her favorite painted sky hues. Behind him a Mexican poncho hung from a hook on the corner coat rack. They had bought them at a food festival on a trip to Albuquerque to visit her father. It was raining, and the ponchos did a better job than the sunscreen keeping them from getting sunburned in the midday heat as they filled their bellies with corn-on-a-sick and al pastor street tacos. She had stuck a roadrunner feather in the collar of the poncho and told him that it was the state bird of New Mexico. And now he could wear the feather and the poncho and not look like such a tourist. The feather was still there. He wore the same poncho every time he went to visit her home state.
The breeze gusted through the window knocking the poncho off of its hook and on to the floor. He picked it up, not liking things to be out of place and couldn’t help but sniff the fabric hoping for phantoms of his past to come through in his memories. He could almost smell the chorizo now. He put the poncho on and saw the roadrunner feather still dancing in the breeze at the collar. He held up his arms in the mirror and noted that he looked like a macaw with wings outstretched in the draping and colorful fabric. He smiled as there was a strange ‘Guthrie shaped’ bird staring back at him in the mirror and he couldn’t help but think that Deb had known this when she bought the ponchos from the corner vendor at the street festival so many years ago. She never called him quirky when he told her how he often wished he was a bird.
Before he knew it he had taken off the poncho and had it sitting on his lap at his desk. He hadn’t even really thought about the task as he found himself placing feathers from the old trunk into the coarse and rainbow fabric one by one. Every memory he placed overlapping another as he kept the feathers clustered in like colors and hues. As the hours passed and the feathers amassed within the fabric of the aged poncho his fingers ached, but he kept going. Finch and woodpecker, goose and swan. Falcon and swallow, pelican and sparrow. The feathers and the memories flooded into the present as they began to cover the surface of the fabric. He only stopped to take a look at the pastel pink sky as the sun went down over the horizon. He smiled as a tear went down his cheek because he somehow knew that Deb was showing him her smile through the rose colored sky.
The owls sang Guthrie a melody to ease the burden of the task with the crickets singing the background chorus. He blindly reached into the old wooden trunk and found nothing but a weathered cedar bottom with his sightless hand. He looked over the edge of the trunk and found it to be empty. Before him was a feathered cloak. Replacing the dyed jute stripes that once reminded him of tacos and corn was a swath of feathers. He had arranged the feathers so delicately by size and color so that instead of man made stripes, it now held the colors of nature and of God. Greens and whites, reds and yellows, a lifetime of memories woven into a tapestry of down and keratin. His eyes welled with tears and with pride.
Picking up the cloak adorned with hundreds of beautiful patchwork feathers, he realized that he was holding his life in his hands. Every event that was marked with a feather on display and it set his heart on fire. He pulled the poncho over his head and walked out the back door. Taking the ladder from its hooks on the back of the garage, he propped it against the eaves of the house and began to climb. Feeling the coarse texture of asphalt shingles under his hands, he pulled himself to his feet and climbed to the ridge of the roof. Standing on the edge and peering toward the west he could still see the painted sky, and in that he saw Deb, and he could feel what he knew to be God.
He outstretched his arms which now looked like wings as the tears streamed down his smiling and wrinkled face. The wind began to blow, and Guthrie sobbed a happy laugh as he felt his bare feet leaving the coarse footing of the asphalt roof.
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A week later when the mail hadn’t been picked up from the mailbox and David the postman took notice, Guthrie was proclaimed missing. He was never seen again, and there was eventually a plaque placed on a slab of granite at the base of the apple tree at the corner of Frederick and 7th. Guthrie and Deborah Green had donated every year to the city parks and recreation fund more than any other person in town. Their only request was to keep the apple tree healthy and to allow William’s Orchard to give the apples away for free, but to leave the fruits that fall to the ground for the doves. The inscription etched into it contained their names and a quote. It was the only thing that was written on the note that Guthrie had left on his desk the night they assumed he went missing. It read:
Guthrie and Deborah Green
“We have finally found our wings and if you need us, we will be in the rose pink sky in the west at dusk.”
The End
But it isn’t really The End, is it?