I hate birds
I had never seen Winston before that economics class, but no one else knew him either. He was a weird presence: that schnauzerous name combined with a bored face and an ambiguous hefty build--“Is he on the football team?" "No.”-- Really nothing about him was distinct: he sat relatively toward the back of room C35 between 9:04-9:52 the second semester of my third year of high school, two-thousand seven in the year of our Lord.
The hideous florescent colors public schools paint their walls with promote attentiveness, which is why C35 had been graced with the finest off-whites, sea-foamed greens and siennas. Even if the allegation is true, the room was so comfortably warm, the desks were already broken-in, and those florescent lights were much too bright for morning eyes.
It didn't help that Dr. Peterson was as turtle-like as the next high school Economics teacher. He had a beaky philtrum, skinny neck and underbelly sweater vests, coupled with a pinched voice. His teaching philosophy was to strongly encourage discussion, and therefore his grading policy solely on participation. He learned early in his career that the only way to fight against the elements was to phrase nearly everything he said as a question; the twenty of us would wait for the moments we could raise our hands and feign passion on some economic issue we knew nothing about so that Dr. Peterson would check our name off three times on the attendance sheet-except for Winston. Winston never participated; he never uttered a word. While we all rushed to stockpile our grade and hear ourselves speak, Winston sat like a stone. An unexplained and unaffected elephant-shaped stone that only I seemed to be baffled by. I needed to know what his deal was: where did he come from? Why had I never seen him before? What sort of things did he like to do? Was he on drugs? Was he a total idiot that had no idea what was going on, or was he some sort of genius that was so intelligent, he found no use taking part in our half-assed conversations?
“By a show of hands, how many of you know what the state bird is?” Dr. Peterson said one unparticular day. “The state bird? the state bird is the cardinal. Yes, the cardinal. Some people like to joke and say that the other state bird is the orange barrel, the orange barrel meaning road construction, and those barrels, that seem to just drop in for half the year”
Then Winston spoke. “I hate birds,” he said.
Dr. Peterson went on with the lecture. He said the point was to illustrate supply and demand economics, like when a trend suddenly is in high-demand and everyone has to have one of something, and the prices fluctuate.
I was disoriented: that illustration had absolutely nothing to do with our conversation. It tied in so loosely to the subject matter that I thought some sort of divine intervention had just taken place. But what did it mean? Why did he hate birds? What horrific wrong did birds commit? What could birds have done that had lodged itself so strongly in his psyche, that he could not remain silent on this issue? What had birds done that he just couldn't take anymore? Is 'birds' symbolic?
Winston might've worked in a pet shop last summer. Among his lengthy list of duties would be to clean the bird room. Every day, he'd enter their congested quarters that was louder than Eden, inhaling their tufts and cleaning up their shit. He would wonder if the birds could even understand one another or if each obnoxious squawk or twittering outburst was only an attempt to make their presence known, to capture anyone's attention long enough to be registered or affirmed. He hated cleaning up their shit.
Maybe when Winston was ten his parents got divorced. On the day that they told him, they might have called him inside from the backyard, where he was watching the bird feeder he made in class the day before. He had slathered peanut butter over a pine cone and rolled it in bird seed and now twirled on an oak in the backyard. He just stared at his parents and the cordial distance between them on the couch, not sure what to think, and he would have wished the birds hadn't flown away whenever he tried to come closer, before he was called inside. Now whenever he thinks of birds, all he can remember is their standoffishness.
Maybe his girlfriend broke up with him on the bench in the park where they made out for the first time. It was dark then, but this time it was early afternoon, and instead of warm winds, serene stars and his mouth on hers, the pond was mephitic and the bench was surrounded by a minefield of limp green turds. She probably said “It’s not you, it’s me,” but she was tired of him, and he never opened up to her, anyway. He would awkwardly reach out to touch her shoulder and she'd flinch. Then he would've sat there long after she left, watching geese run after one another's tails sauntering over to him, desiring crusts of bread over companionship.
Maybe Winston hated that birds were always in the peripheral, out of reach, elusive. Maybe he hated that whenever he tried to mimic their caws, they seemed unimpressed with his efforts. Maybe they just reminded him of something that continues as he gets older: that he feels very unable to connect with anyone and that he is unable to communicate effectively, and it makes his voice falter and his words jumble. Maybe they reminded him that he's confined to one way of observing the world and all he'd ever be was someone else's peripheral. It's completely absurd that I will never know Winston outside of 'I hate birds' and nor would he, if he even paid attention, know me outside of my tally marks.
Winston doesn't require faith in the thought that despite fragmentation, muddled words and dissonance, it is possible and holy that we might be able to receive a glimpse of a person. He probably doesn't find that miraculous.
