Val Muller

A tiny baby bird, watching the chaos in total zen.

It’s spirit week at my school, meaning the students dress up as a theme each day. Wednesday was “zoo day,” and as a teacher balancing end-of-year projects, standardized testing, makeup work, and end-of-year “excitement,” I feel some days like a zookeeper.

We also just finished reading The Life of Pi, a story in which the protagonist thrives in telling stories, many involving the human-like qualities of animals. The novel highlights the sense of wonder the protagonist experiences at the grand design of the universe. This week, I found my own “wonder” as I got to enjoy my own “zoo” of sorts.

Imagine: it’s a cool night, the humidity finally low, and I’m propped on a rock retaining wall, pulling stubborn new shoots of Rose of Sharon out of the garden. Yesterday’s rain had softened the soil, and it’s easier work than usual. My two corgis are sitting in the grass, calmly sniffing the air.

I’m pulling weeds indiscriminately, throwing them into a pile behind me. I’m trying to be careful, stay clean. A particularly tough shoot of Rose of Sharon sends a speck of dirt into my eye. It wedges between my contact lens and my eyelid. I should have known; it was a sign.

Go inside. Watch TV.

But I ignore it. It’s too nice out, and besides, I’m a weeding maniac. I had set out to weed only one-third of the garden, but things are going so well, I might just finish the whole thing!

All is well until a chirping of birds crescendos. Leia and Yoda take off, and nature’s peaceful symphony is ruptured, replaced by squawks and squeals.

Startled, I jump from the retaining wall. Covered in dirt, wearing gloves, and dropping gardening shears along the wall, I hurry to find the corgis circling a rather large baby bird that is plopped in the middle of the driveway. I have no idea how it got there.

Dear Human: There is a dog nearby. Please help.

The bird’s parents circle the dogs overhead, chirping alarm. Yoda, the good dog, backs off right away, eyeing the situation from afar. The bad one, Leia, ever curious, continues circling the bird, getting within millimeters of it, her nose vibrating. The bird reacts by spreading its wings, screeching, a technique that serves only to increase Leia’s curiosity.

I push myself between Leia and the bird, staring down at it. It calms immediately, looking up at me as if—almost as if it expects me to do something helpful. But it looks so fragile, I’m afraid to pick it up.

My commands mean nothing to Leia, and though she’s never hurt an animal (well, okay, there was that mouse that one time), I don’t want the bird to have a heart attack or anything (can birds have heart attacks?).

Parent birds swooping near Leia do nothing to discourage the corgi.

Perplexed and frustrated, but also very curious about the bird, I cease my unheeded commands and grab the corgi, still wearing my gardening gloves. I bring the dogs inside, and an amused husband commences to start a photo session, documenting the plight of the driveway bird. Turns out, it was in the middle of a not-very-successful-flying-lesson. Upon further investigation, he finds two tiny (really really tiny) baby birds just hanging out silently in a bush. They seem indifferent to everything happening, and even our camera (and finger, see photo—for size comparison purposes) don’t seem to bother them.

The parent birds continue squawking at their offspring, guiding it through clumsy flutters into another densely-weeded garden (guess I won’t be weeding that one anytime soon), and I continue weeding.

The baby bird manages to plop-flutter to a nearby garden. Almost safe!

I stuff the pile of weeds into one of those brown paper yard waste bags and head inside. My first instinct is to shower, but the dogs are wound up, so I change my pants into shorts and cuddle with the dogs for a bit first. I marvel at the wonder of the interactions among three unlikely species.

I learn only later that one of those “weeds” was actually poison ivy. My arms continue to break out, and even my legs, which had been covered, start to itch. I realize too late that when I grabbed Leia with my gloved hands, I probably spread a bit of poison ivy oil onto her coat, which then spread back onto me when we cuddled. She has now been bathed, as have all the clothes.

Still, it was an interesting night. I learned that a human can’t frighten a bird, a bird can’t intimidate a dog, a crazy dog can’t be made to listen to a human, and Mother Nature always gets the last laugh.

Oh, and thank goodness for calamine lotion.

In The Kite Runner, protagonist Amir’s mother dies during childbirth in pre-war-torn Afghanistan. With the one-sided perspective of his father (physical strength! business prowess!), Amir’s childhood has the potential to be nightmarish. But Amir finds the role of “mother” filled by a male business associate of his father, a man who encourages Amir to write stories even though Amir’s father doesn’t approve. In the end, the support of Rahim Khan, the mother-figure, drives Amir to find redemption and fulfillment. Like most “mothers,” Rahim Khan saw Amir’s potential and helped him find ways to grow into that potential, nurturing him and directing him.

For this Friday’s post—and in honor of Mother’s Day last Sunday—I wanted to write a tribute to mothers and mother figures everywhere.

I invited my mother to my house on Sunday. The plan was to go out to lunch and then grab some ice cream. While walking around my yard, Mom saw a pile of weeds I’d recently pulled—I was battling a climbing vine-beast that was threatening to kill a lavender bush. Of course, in typical mother fashion, Mom spent most of the day pulling weeds from my garden. I never asked her to—she just kind of started in a matter-of-fact way: there are weeds to be pulled, so I am going to pull them. At one point, she asked to borrow a t-shirt and sunscreen. That was the extent of her request. Mom is petite, but I watched as she pulled tenacious vines and hauled large branches across the yard. I often think of myself as tough as a tiger. Now I see where I get that from. It was such a beautiful day that I realize Mom wouldn’t have wanted to spend Mother’s Day anywhere but outside. The ice cream was well-deserved by all that evening.

When I was at Giant early Sunday morning, picking up groceries for the week, the place was packed, but there were really only two other grocery shoppers. Both were women, both had carts full of food, and both shopped at an “efficient pace.” The rest of the shoppers were men—many with young children in tow—who walked around the store slowly, uncertainly. They didn’t know which aisles contained which items. It was clear that grocery shopping was not a familiar activity for them. Most of them ended up in the greeting card aisle—after flocking to one of the many flower displays around the store. At the speedy checkout line, most of them had three things: a card, flowers, and a dessert.

At first I thought: I’d much rather have my husband actually do the grocery shopping for me than pick up flowers and dessert. But then I thought: how much would I have to explain to him about the types and amount of groceries I normally buy? Watching some of the men stumble around the store, I realized it might be the same for many. The men buying flowers were simply looking for a way to recognize their wives for all they do and have done.

I’m not saying all women are “good” at shopping for groceries and all men are terrible at it. During normal grocery visits, I often see men with loaded-up carts of food. “Mother figures” are not limited by gender or age. Mother figures are those who somehow manage to keep everything together for everyone else, regardless of what happens. They make sure there’s food on the table. They make sure there’s a hug to be given—literally or figuratively. They know which strings to pull, which strings to tighten, which strings to cut or to tie. They offer the right encouragement at the right time. Like Rahim Khan, they can literally change the course of someone’s life.

Like the men fumbling around in the grocery store, I often find it’s difficult to find a meaningful way to thank my mother—and all the teachers and friends who have acted as mother figures from time to time. Mothers do so much for us. Like my mother demonstrated with last week’s weeding, serving others just seems to be in their blood. They look out for their loved ones unprovoked. I’ve always told Mom that a bouquet of flowers simply could never do justice to the gratefulness in my heart. The flowers and cards and desserts are just symbols—superficial things that barely scratch the surface of reciprocating the ways our mothers and mother figures have touched and shaped our lives.

Even though I am a writer, I feel that these words are not much different from those flowers and those cards and that colorfully-decorated cake. They reflect the right sentiment, but there is depth these words cannot capture, and I think many of us feel the same way.

And so I’ll leave today’s post with this: to all the mothers, mother-in-laws, mother figures, moms to four-legged fur-children—thank you for all that you do. You change the world in ways that words simply cannot express, but know that the world is better for your presence. And that’s something to celebrate.

There are just some concepts in life that language cannot capture. And the gratefulness we feel toward our mothers just happens to be one of them.

Excuse me while I wax literary today.

We just finished reading The Stranger in class, and one of our discussions steered itself toward whether Camus should be considered an optimist or a pessimist. Camus wrote as an absurdist (often considered an existentialist), stating that life has no given, universal purpose. There is no set meaning in life.

Some people argue that Camus is a pessimist, that there is a given meaning simply waiting to be discovered, and that Camus just couldn’t see it.

Others don’t like the question altogether. They panic, disgusted by the idea that life has no meaning. Camus would argue that these people accept what others dictate as a meaning in life, or the right way to live, and they become unhappy if they fall short. Some don’t like having the responsibility of finding, creating, or maintaining meaning in life.

In the humorous novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, Arthur Dent learns that the answer to life is 42. Literally. Of course, this answer fits the humor of the entire novel, but it does illustrate Camus’ point: it’s absurd to think there is one universal meaning in life. Besides, once discovered, what else would there be to live for?

I prefer to look at Camus’ assertion as optimistic. If there is no definite meaning in life, then we are free to find our own. And if our chosen “meaning” stops pleasing us, then we are free to create another.

I’ve heard many pessimistic outlooks on life:

I work five days for the sake of two days off.

I work fifty weeks for the benefit of a two-week vacation.

The best years of your life are high school.

Or college.

Life is over when your children grow up.

All of these imply that there is a high point in life, and all else is pointless, a denouement. None of these are true. Camus would encourage holders of such viewpoints to “wake up” and take control of their lives. He believed we periodically need a “wake-up call” to remind us that life is finite, to jar us from the daily routines that numb us.

For main character Meursault, a man who committed a senseless murder after living an emotionless life, his wake-up call happens as he is sentenced to death and awaiting his execution. For his father, the wake-up call was witnessing an execution, an event that made him sick but changed his outlook on life. In fact, Camus wrote The Stranger partly as a wake-up call for the readers—for Meursault’s carelessness and consequence to wake us out of our daily lives.

In the end, Meursault realizes only right before death that he had indeed been happy—he just hadn’t realized it. There were so many little things in his life that brought him joy even though he never consciously acknowledged them: the touch of a woman’s skin, watching the world go by on a lazy Sunday afternoon, swimming in the ocean under the burning sun, even the touch of a dry, soft towel. He realized too late that his meaning in life was simply to enjoy it.

The meaning of life is not 42. It’s not to be a good person or climb a career ladder or buy a hundred cars or raise children or change the world. These are all things that may bring happiness and meaning to some. But it’s up to each of us to take responsibility for our own happiness. We need to define that happiness, to find joy in what we can. There is no universal meaning; rather—as Back to the Future’s Doc Brown likes to say, it’s “what you make of it, so make it a good one.”

I started Fantastic Friday posts because I see too many people going through life in a haze, a daze, a repetitive trance. They are given the gift of so many days, but they do not take the time to find meaning or joy. They always seem to be waiting for something else.

It’s the small things that bring joy. The touch of a woman. A lazy Sunday. The kiss of a breeze. There are little things all around us. It is our task only to seek them out—and smile.