The other day, as I wended my way from one building to another on my work campus, I noticed a robin flitting to a tree overhead with a long dangling oddment in its beak, and I was charmed to realize he was tending a twittering nest above me. Smiling, I continued on my way.

Later that same day, following the same path, I noticed something on the sidewalk ahead of me. My first thought was that it was, like the dessicated brown wafer here immortalized in verse, a dead frog. The pointy butt I seemed to perceive seemed to support the ranid portion of the theory, and the strange, pallid pink, covered with a sickly blue fuzz that could only be mold, went to the “deceased” portion of the proceedings. But, before I could think to wonder how an amphibian could be so long dead to be molded and be neither eaten nor before noted in the walkway, I came closer, and saw that the pointy little rear, the naked pink skin, and the light touches of pale blue down, belonged to a baby robin.

I cannot call it a ‘fledgeling’, for it was not yet fledged. Only a line of black and white striped pinfeathers adorned its half-folded wings. It was too young to have even tried to fly, and it must have fallen from the nest above. Its little head was turned to one side, as if it were sleeping with its cheek against the ground. There was no blood.

There are awful things that happen every day all around the world, but they are far away, and we have to force ourselves to believe in them, to feel. But little moments like that, the little, unimportant tragedies of the real world, are real and vivid and touch your heart. Is it a lack of perspective? I would say, rather, that it is a sign your heart still works, despite all the pain it’s had to ignore and distance.