Erma Bombeck Writing Competition  

Dad used to hang bird feeders on a clothesline out back. He'd climb a stepladder to replenish sunflower seeds, millet, and thistle, and even a tray of peanuts for the squirrels. After his surgery, we added a pulley system, so Dad could lower the feeders and nourish birds from solid ground.

He only ever knew the names for about six of them. The Blue Jay and Cardinal, of course, and Robins, I suppose, but he guessed the rest from a singing Birds of the World clock in our kitchen. From his perch on the stained linoleum, Dad would look first at the clock and then point out the window saying: “White-breasted Nuthatch,” or “There’s a Black-capped Chickadee.”

While some of his observations bore a passing resemblance, this wasn’t a Birds of Ohio timepiece. Thus, plenty of the clock’s winged creatures would never have swooped between our basketball hoop and treehouse. There were no Birds of Paradise in Dad’s yard that year, and the Eastern Screech-Owl was unlikely to be found munching safflower on our clothesline in full sun.

Despite the flawed info, Dad relied on that clock to make sense of his world. Because when you have brain surgery, after doctors cut your head open and remove star-shaped malignancies, they also disappear memories and time. In my father’s case, that meant he forgot our names and couldn’t think of words like ‘plunger’ or ‘shoehorn.’ But cancer also vanished whole ideas he used to know, like how we couldn’t identify all birds from a clock in our kitchen.

In the hourglass of that last difficult spring, Dad and I took to wandering the yard. While ravens gronked overhead, we’d spend half an hour recoiling the hose. Another afternoon, we’d unspool it again to water the garden we hadn't gotten around to planting. Once, Dad asked for scissors. He couldn’t remember the word but instead made a cutting gesture with two fingers. So we pruned side-by-side idly trimming the Rose of Sharon shrubs that had multiplied along the front walk. Mom declared them invasive and desired their removal, but even in illness Dad cultivated life, so the weedy aggressors stayed, obstructing the way forward but attracting hummingbirds nonetheless.

There''s a photograph from that time of Dad in his electrode cap, that stupid-looking experimental treatment that disrupted the tumors just enough for us to pretend to hope. In the picture, Dad stands smiling on a tree stump, its rings chalked brown around his feet. His days are numbered but he’s forgotten. He’s kept busy picking forget-me-nots for Mom. If you lean in close, you can see crows circling above, while from the kitchen a Red-Winged Blackbird trills three times calling Dad home.