The Grad School Diaries: Meeting C-Bird

It was a dark and stormy morning, but we only live about eight minutes from campus, and unless there has been an actual blizzard we don’t really have any excuse for staying away. Accordingly, my wife and I had risen, dressed, and gathered up our belongings for another day of allegedly gainful employment. As we pulled into the strip mall up the road from our house we could already hear a faint song coming from the top of the structure.

“Is that him?” my wife asked, peering up at the dry cleaners’ sign.

“Yes,” I replied. “Look in the center of the ‘c’. It looks like he’s got his nest just about ready.”

I slid out of the Torrent and scooped up the bag of clothing from out of the back seat. This strip mall uses the sort of plastic sign where each letter is a three-dimensional construct, separate from all of the others. It’s eye-catching and surprisingly energy efficient, not to mention economical to maintain, since if you lose a letter you can just replace it, instead of having to buy a whole new sign. As I approached the shop, I could clearly see a large male house sparrow perched on the letter “C” in “Cleaners,” chirping away like mad. The cavity of the “C” was stuffed full of twigs, dried grass, and everything else a little bird could possible hope for in building a nest, and the sparrow was clearly calling for a mate, as he ignored the cars, the weather, the other male birds, and me. Still, I greeted him politely as I stepped up. “Hey, C-Bird,” I called as I walked into the store. “How ya doin’?”

I suppose I should explain that many years ago the woman who would later become my wife and her (then three-year-old) daughter were at a friend’s house to collect a kitten they had agreed to adopt (a large tortoiseshell they had decided to call Columbus), when they noticed the last kitten in the litter sitting by himself in the kitchen. On impulse, they decided to adopt the extra kitten, a Russian Blue with a stub tail, and my future wife asked what they should call him.

“R” said the little girl.

“You mean our?” her mother asked, puzzled.

“No, R, like that!” her daughter replied, pointing. Sure enough, directly above the kitten was one of those magnetic letters of the alphabet that children of that age play with, in the shape of a capital letter R. The kitten was sitting under the letter, as if naming himself.

My future wife considered. “How about R-Kitty?” she asked, thinking that this would at least give the poor creature a name (however eccentric), and not just a letter. Fortunately, her daughter agreed, and that’s how R-Kitty got his name. Fast forward 20 years, and we find ourselves in the parking lot of a strip mall in East Lansing, Michigan, where we encounter a large house sparrow who was building a nest in the middle of the letter “C” in “Cleaners.” We reasoned that if a kitten who sits under the letter R can be called R-Kitty, then a bird who nests in the letter “C” should be called C-Bird. And as our second winter in Michigan began to transition into spring he became our friend, a regular at the dry cleaner’s shop just like we were…

Sometimes I worry about the isolation that is part and parcel of a doctoral student’s life. I've made some friends at work, mostly among the doctoral students, but I've had very little contact with anyone else in the Lansing area. However I might feel about it (and making friends has never been one of my best things) I'm currently involved in a career activity that involves sitting at your desk up to 70 hours a week, trying to internalize research from years or decades ago. Someday soon, I know, I will leave this place and go out into a world filled with more human contact that you could shake a stick at – but for the moment, apart from a few members of the Business School and my immediate family, my closest friends for a hundred miles in any direction are a robin, a goldfinch, a Northern Cardinal – and a house sparrow who lives in the letter “C” of the electric sign at my neighborhood dry cleaners…

And yet, sometimes, it’s enough…