Keep Hope Alive

A few days ago I purchased this greeting card.  Discovering it in the store gave me a thrill - for the past couple weeks I have been wanting to post here about the subject of hope, and planned to include an image of the first few lines of Emily Dickinson's poem against a photo of yes, a bird.  Originally I was going to include a gorgeous photograph of a crimson red cardinal, warm and bright against a wintry background.  Fitting, I thought, for the idea of hope.  Cue finding this card, and it's been resting on my work desk ever since.

Hope is for some of us a scary concept, especially those of us prone to extremes (ahem).  Too much of it and we mistake the comfort for a free Greyhound ticket to Denial (Greyhound should be the only accepted and allowed method of transport back to grimy, backwards Denial.  Our punishment for such a masochistic trip).  We tell ourselves, "There's hope!"  We hope for them to get sober, we hope for them to make amends, we hope for them to realize all they've done to hurt us and hope that they'll realize just how much they don't want to lose us so that they'll choose us over the bottle.  We hope that we can be their consequence, their bottom.  Is that really what I want to hope for?  "Why can't I be his bottom?"  Uh, ew.

Too little hope and we are in despair.  We are hopeless.  Stuck in our doom and gloom we catastrophize and worry, we prepare for the worst - starring heroines (or heros) in our own imaginary fairytale tower, we lay in wait thinking there is just no damn way our one true love is going to slay their own shitty dragon.  Nope, we're just victims and there's absolutely nothing we can do.  We focus on our qualifiers and lose ourselves.

Of course, there needs to be a balance with hope, and there needs to be an understanding of just what kind of hope is okay to hope.  The hope is ultimately for our own serenity, whether the alcoholic is drinking or not.  It is for us.  But us good al anons, we love to give everything to our alcoholics.  

"You can take this, you can take that, here have this too - I will give you everything I have until I am sucked dry and exhausted and without dignity and self-respect, and then I will feel guilty for not being able to give you more.  Here, I will even give you my hope!  It's all I have left, but it's yours now, so the hope is for you to stop drinking.  It's not about me anymore."

Cut to today.  After a "French Chic" themed lunch with friends after the morning meeting, I was on my way home down a main street, a box of 6 macarons as my co-pilot (talk about a sweet ride).  

Driving along, I followed a turn in the road and saw something in the middle of the lane next to me.  It was a bird. Sitting awkwardly and obviously injured, it gazed up at the sky with its mouth agape.  I was horrified and wishing with the sick feeling in my stomach that it didn't die that way, crying out in pain or for help.  

"Maybe it's not dead."  I started the conversation with myself.

"Am I really going to turn around for this bird?"  

"Well you can't let it sit there in the road - it's going to get hit."

"People are going to think I'm crazy going into the road for a bird.  Am I really going to do this?"

"So. *shrug*  You rescue snails on the sidewalk."

"What if it's dead?  I mean, what if it's dead?  Can you handle that?"

"But what if it's not.  Can you handle not knowing?  Can you handle that?"

Sigh.  No.  No I can't.

I flip a U-turn, enter the adjacent shopping center and empty a shoebox I happen to have in the front seat.  I hurry out of the car in my red suede pumps to the road, waiting for cars to stop flying by.  At first from my distance, the bird is so still it does appear to be dead.  But a car whooshes over it and then another, and I see its head turn to and fro.  It is petrified.  Its mouth is agape again, without a sound.

At this point, I am visibly pleading with the cars.  "Please stop!''  And then I say my worst fear out loud.  "Please don't hit this bird in front of me, please don't hit this bird!"  Surely people must see the little one, but no one slows or stops.  No one except one crazy Francophile broad in an ill-fitting black vest and red lipstick who may or may not be talking to herself.

The traffic slows and I take my chance, scooping the bird into the box.  When it tries to get away I'm relieved - it's in better shape than I thought.  Okay little one, I tell the flapping box, okay.  

Wouldn't you know, there's an animal clinic in that very shopping center.  I teeter through the parked cars, my long tassel necklace swaying side to side with my hurry, and through the doors of the clinic, breathless with a mixture of embarrassment and too many crêpes.  The receptionist's gaze, though unwavering, betrays her wish to eyeroll me.

"We don't take birds here.  And even if we did the vet is gone for the day."  She directs me to a clinic down the road that takes birds.  Somehow we make it in spite of my attempts at keeping the box steady and shock-absorbed by knee-driving.  The office cat flirts with me while I wait.  Now that I think about it he probably wanted what he saw as a neatly-wrapped snack.  The woman ahead of me looks curiously at the Donald Pliner box (eBay) but never asks.

"Oh you'll want to take it to the wildlife rescue." Again, directed elsewhere. "They're closed now but just bang on the door - they're still inside."  On the road again, feeling like Goldilocks.

We arrive, along the way passing a few critters in the road who hadn't been so lucky.  After some frantic knocking I see ah, the door is unlocked.  A confused volunteer pushes it open and invites me in.  I hurry to the admissions desk like Shirley MacLaine, and another volunteer swiftly and gently takes the bird from me.

"Here, fill this out" - someone else hands me an admission form.  An admission form.  I briefly think to myself, "Really?" but almost collape in relief at the bureaucratic validation of this midday rescue mission.

Date.  Time.  Species.  # Individuals.  I print legibly and press firmly as instructed.

Reason(s) for Admission - CAUGHT BY CAT (in all caps - not sure why).  BAT - COMPLETE QUESTIONNAIRE (also in all caps).  Electrocuted.  Caught by Dog.  Gun shot (dear god).  Vehicle collision.  Possible poisoning.  Caught in trap.  Struck window.  Caught by human.  Fell in pool.  Unknown trauma.  "Caught by human," hehe.  Technically true.  I end up going with "unknown trauma."

The volunteer who took the bird comes back from a room I can't see, presumably where some of the animals are kept.  "Is he - or she - going to be okay?"

"She.  Yes she's just a little freaked out right now but I think she'll be okay.  Right now she's in the room with the baby birds."  The volunteer behind the desk lets me know I can check on her using the number referenced on my form.

A small sign at the desk asks "Please help us care for your animal with a tax deductable donation!".  As I sign a check for $20, I tell her about the greeting card.  I figure what the hell, so I ask her.

"Can I name her...Hope?"

She smiles.  "You know, if you name the animal we actually write it on the top of their form, and you can check on her using that name."  She writes it down, and hands me my copy.

As I write this, my hope is that the wildlife center is doing their best to keep Hope alive.  To heal her, to nurse her back to health, to rehabilitate her and one day, to set her free to fly again.  And right now I can honestly say that I feel her perched in my soul.  Singing the tune without the words, never stopping at all.