Cardinals are assholes.
So are Blue Jays, but that’s another story.
Bright red, like a streak of blood in the wet grass, the cardinal hops around aggressively, scaring all the other flighted things away. Then it stands, cocking its head, letting us absorb its crimson magnificence until it grows bored and flies off. It is pretty. But in my experience pretty things usually have shit personalities, or a penchant for psychosis. And the cardinals are no exception.
Nevertheless, my family delights at the sight of them. My husband will see one in our yard and say in his native Hebrew, “look, a red bird,” even though I’ve told him the name, he’ll never remember. Neither will my kids. “Cardinals are mean,” I say. There is a sense of finality to it, and everyone falls quiet. “But why?” one of the kids will ask. I never have an answer. I just know it’s true. It certainly feels like an indisputable fact.
Maybe it’s because they’re too brash, too bold, too territorial.
Or maybe I’m like my grandmother, and I’m just jealous.
My mother conjures up my grandmother with this phrase. “She was jealous of birds.” My grandmother was a holocaust survivor who lived through both Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. Birds were kind of her thing. She loved them intensely, but said she never stopped envying their freedom.
During the war, she would watch the birds as they flew in large swooping arcs, carefully avoiding the plumes of smoke exhaled by the crematorium smokestacks. My grandmother’s jealousy was so sharp she felt it in her teeth: what a crime that the birds should fly freely under an open canopy of sky, willfully ignorant of all the horror happening below.
Kibaszott seggfejek, she probably muttered at them, seething with rage. (Google Translate says that means fucking assholes in Hungarian).
I like to hold this unfamiliar image of her in my head: resolute, pissed off, cursing at the birds in her inscrutable tongue. In my imagination she shakes her fist at them, the same hand she used to gently smooth my hair or peel the skin off an apple, cutting it up into bite-sized pieces. Her anger made her stronger. She will survive, she decides. Fuck those fucking birds.
In reality I can’t imagine her saying anything harsh to any living thing, even those asshole birds and their easy freedom. She has been gone nearly 30 years and remains the sweetest person I have ever met.
But maybe I’ve got it wrong, and she looked at them with determination, not jealousy. To simply fly away from that nightmare. Free. The open sky a promise. I imagine her squinting up at the birds as though looking for a sign. Maybe they were a good omen, these hülye madarak (stupid birds). Red and blue and black winged icons. Freedom birds. Soon, she would spread her wings and fly away.
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Belgian psychotherapist Ester Perel, herself a child of holocaust survivors, said that there are two types of people who made it out of the holocaust. Those who survived, and those who lived. My Grandmother fell in the latter category. She carried genocide with her for the rest of her life. But she was able to smile again, finding joy in her family, in cooking, in watching American TV. She had a wicked sense of humor and endless generosity of heart.
Birds remind me of her. But they also remind me not to take anything for granted. Especially when it comes to freedom. The freedom to live, to take flight, to be as you want, live how you choose, take up roost with whomever you love, wherever you like.
Some days I get so caught up with the minutiae of daily life - the mortgage bills, the dentist appointments, the fate of the broken world - that I forget. I am human, trapped in my own grievances and past traumas, reliving the parts that keep me up at night. But remembering that is a gift. Even that, somehow feels miraculous. To have survived.
Because we have wings, should we choose to use them. There are snow-dusted mountains and beautiful music and red balloons and children laughing and poems that have been translated into twenty languages. We are here, only fleetingly, to live the gamut of that nuanced human experience. My grandmother understood that. And sometimes, I understand it too.
I don’t feel any of this when I look at cardinals, though.
Because cardinals are assholes.
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