A warm afternoon in early March, and the dog and I are sitting in the sunshine on the deck. There is a birdfeeder hanging just on the other side of the deck rail in front of me, perhaps only six feet away. A single small round bird is feeding, apparently also enjoying the sun’s munificence. I am watching the bird eat—seed husks spilling out of both sides of its beak—while I ride a slowly snaking train of thought on its way to nowhere in particular.
Then the air shatters suddenly someplace just to my left, and a hawk bullets past the birdfeeder in a laser-straight line, a speckled football that plucks the bird off its perch like a street magician making a dollar bill disappear. The dog jumps to her feet and breathes a reflexive growl, but it is over and done by the time either of us knows what happened. My eyes linger on the motionless birdfeeder while I shake off the impulse toward horror and replace it with the ragged beginnings of a joke: “it’s called a birdfeeder for a reason.”
A half hour later a student emails me, inquiring about her grade and apologizing for several missing assignments. She says that things have not been good. She says she has been struggling and unable to keep up with her classes because several members of her family have recently been killed, victims of ethnic cleansing, slaughtered as part of the genocide ripping its way through the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia.
She asks about the possibility for extra credit to bring her grade up.
My eyes linger on the motionless words on the screen, and I am unable to shake off the impulse toward horror because there is nothing to replace it with.
