A Bird Named Rufus

Two days ago I stood in my driveway in North Carolina and heard a familiar lilt —“tee hee hee hee hee.” Now that’s a sign of spring.

It’s a sunny day and I’ll just let the rays warm my keyboard while I tell you a story about a bird. Pull up a chair and make yourself at home.

Two days ago I heard the familiar lilt of my favorite bird—“tee hee hee hee hee.”

Time was when I wandered around on my grandfather’s retirement farm in Meade County, Kentucky, looking for the bird that made that sound. Before I became a stuck-up city girl, my main pastime was running loose, face slathered with clay, like nature girl. I’d check the size of the tadpoles in the pond. I’d look for arrowheads. I’d beg my grandfather to dig up the Indian burial ground. When he said no, I’d sulk off on my lone mission to find a bird that didn’t want to be seen.

Every day it was the same drill. Wait for the bird’s trill and then try to spot it.

The bird became my Holy Grail.

No matter how fast I ran, no matter how secret my perch, it eluded me. There were very tall deciduous trees on the farm, and the bird seemed to like the interface between the trees and the field. I just knew I wasn’t big enough to spot the bird. But even with a pair of hand-me-down binoculars from my dad, who was no doubt at the track on the days that I was at the farm, the “tee hee hee hee hee” became a taunt: You’ll never find me—tee hee.

My grandfather had a book on his shelf called American Birds, but even that resource didn't help. In hindsight, my method was flawed. I was trying to match an acoustic memory to a set of photographs. It was no use.

Years passed. My grandfather passed. While my life was flying past, I flew over his farm on a flight to Houston for my interview at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. As the plane followed the western course of the Ohio and then the southern course of the Mississippi, I thought about the bird, but briefly. The bird, it seemed, had won.

While I was spending all my time learning the histologic patterns that tumors make, my daughter, the lone child of two doctors, was spending lots of time in her room with her books.

I didn’t have much time to read to her my year at Anderson. I was a pathologist in a rigorous fellowship program and the wife of a surgeon. Put those two things together and it comes up just short of single parenting. So, I limited our reading to one book a night at bedtime. She was starved for attention and had figured out that the more pages in the book, the longer mom would have to read. Of course, I compensated by skipping tracts of paragraphs, which didn’t work for long because she had a sharp memory and would pipe up when I left something out.

I still recall the night that I asked her what book we should read, and she handed me the book on backyard birds. All fifty-nine pages. Her smile said, “Gotcha.”

While I read to her I noticed a couple things. As a testament to her loneliness and her budding obsessive-compulsive disorder, she had circled the illustration of every bird in the book. Some she circled in purple crayon, some in orange crayon, and some in black ink. By the time I got to the last page, I was mentally drained and didn’t think much about the description of a brush bird that says “drink your tea.”

After a divorce, a second marriage, a second child, the death of a second parent, and a move from Texas to North Carolina, I turned to the two things I felt passionate about: writing and parenting. To fill the void when my son left the nest for preschool, I worked on a novel, creating characters to keep me company. I did my best writing at a window that faced my front yard and its bird feeders.

The day I heard the tee hee hee in North Carolina I felt like a miracle had come to pass. I got up from my Mac and stood at the window. There, under a bush, was a rather ordinary looking black bird, with orange markings below his wing. I ran to the bookshelf and pulled down my grandfather’s book. On page 149 I found Pipilo erythrophthalmus, the rufous-sided towhee. The text described a brush bird.

I couldn’t believe it: All those years of looking up in the tops of trees when I should have been looking down in the brush.

Have you ever looked in the wrong place for something? It’s like forcing an agenda.

The rufous-sided towhee came to be written into the novel, where the quest to spot him is a metaphor for looking high when you should be looking low.

At my house in Carolina you can hear the rufous-sided towhee from February to September. Each time I hear him I’m transported back to Kentucky and my grandfather’s twenty acres that meant so much to me before I got stuck-up.