I go to the mailbox and hear a high, plaintive cry -- the call of a killdeer. Sometimes I hear that note as a cry of longing, other times as a note of despair. During the spring and summer when killdeer call day and night, the birds irritate me. But today, my killdeer --the first of the season -- is a herald of spring.
I am grumpy, irritable, depressed. Yet that call, that killdeer resonates with other birds and other springs. Here on the prairie, spring is not blue skies and balmy weather. March, April and May; gloomy and grey, rainy, the final blasts of snow, punctuated by kinder days.
But the days are getting longer. Life is stirring.
The killdeer is a plover. Short, plump, stocky. Dun or red brown back and wings, light underparts. Two thick black rings encircle the killdeer's neck. Bulging eyes, short bill.
The killdeer nests in a simple scrape scratched out in sand, gravel, loose dirt. To protect her eggs and later her young from predators, she performs the broken-wing display. When a hawk or other predator appears, she holds out one wing from her body as if injured. She runs in zigs and zags away from the nest piping frantically. At the last moment, well away from the scrape, she will take flight to avoid a hawk or fox or other predator.
I am a broken-winged bird. It is not a display to distract or protect. I have become yet more sick with an episode of manic depression over the past week.
Let the theologians argue whether Hell is literal or metaphorical. There is no question. I know. Hell is literal. I have severe mixed states right now -- when one has both depressive and manic symptoms at the same time.
Terrible, ugly self-loathing thoughts and feelings assail me. My speech is muffled, monotone, halting. My gait that of a hundred-year-old man. Yet my thoughts race in a kinetic frenzy. My senses are disturbed -- things don't look, sound, feel right. I am crazed with pain and lay under the coverlets moaning.
This is Hell. This is Hell. This is Hell. Why, God, why, I ask. No answer.
Last night, my seven-year-old son Rocky produces the personal cassette player and box of treasured tapes missing since we moved from Indiana to LeRoy in October.
Through the dark night Yo Yo Ma's rendition of Bach's Unaccompanied Suites for Cello, Gould's version of Bach's Partitas, arias by Handel, Albinoni's Adagio sustain me.
Hell's dark birds flap at the edges all night, but my vision is filled with brightly colored wood warblers and tanagers, and shorebirds wheeling and turning in unison. "In dulce jublio" from Beetohven's Missa Solemnis rings out and, through it, God answers.
This afternoon Linda drives me to the first psychiatrist appointment I've had in months. Why have I sought help here for a such long time? The tale is simple: The greed and incompetence of physicians, cost-cutting by insurance companies, profit over people. That's why I live in Hell much of the time.
The doctor is a good one. We get my meds straightened out, new prescriptions, ongoing care, access in case of emergency.
Linda drives the twenty miles home. Twilight. A skein of geese fly overhead as I get out of the car.
The goose-music sounds like "In dulce jublio."
Copyright 1997, Bud Polk
Free Home Pages at GeoCities