Once again, a less-than-full-grown bird has happened into our lives in need of help.  The difference is, this one looks like it might have a chance of surviving.

My daughter found it – it’s a pigeon by the way – in the dirt under the overpass near my work.  It didn’t make any move to get  up or escape, so she thought it might be hurt.  She had part of a shirt she’d been taking apart with her, so she used it to pick it up and bring it to me.  I borrowed a carrier from work and brought it home.

I took him home. I took him out of the carrier and took a good look at him. He seems fine – doesn’t have any asymmetry or anything like he’s broken a wing, doesn’t fight or struggle like anything hurts. He’s obviously uncomfortable at being handled, but I think being that young helped him adapt to the situation somewhat.

The thing is, his legs don’t seem to work. At all. They are just kind of there and floppy. He can push himself along the ground with his wings, and seems to be somewhat practiced at it, but the legs just drag behind. Otherwise, he seems fine. He’s eating, drinking, reacting to his surroundings; all the stuff a bird should be doing. Just can’t use those feet.

Time will tell how this turns out, but maybe…just maybe…this one will live.

(this is a cross-post from The Secret Chicken)
I hate wasting things. Unfortunately, it means that sometimes, but trying not to waste, I end up wasting even more. Don’t throw that away, it might be useful someday! And of course it never is, and what is more wasteful than having a possibly useful item sitting in a box in the garage? Yeah.

We all have neat things, things we see value in, but which have no real value in our lives. And we ask ourselves, “Why am I keeping this? It’s useless to me! But it’s so neat, and it still has uses…”, so we keep it. In a closet, in a box in the garage, hell, in extreme cases we keep them in storage units because it’s just too hard to get rid of it.

This is where donating comes in. It’s a way of letting these ever-so-useful items become useful again – to someone else.

A lot of us shop at thrift stores, but we don’t consider that we could donate just as easily. We see things that we need, things we didn’t know we needed until we saw them…so why can’t we do that for someone else? Give them a chance to see our neat things, and let them see how much they need neat things.

Last week, I had a few things I wanted to donate. Not much, but a few things. Some clothes my daughter let me pry from her hands, mostly. I put them in a box in the living room, and told my roommate it was there, if he wanted to add to it. And miracle of miracles, he did! He added a jacket he’d had since the 80’s. Some shirts he’d had almost as long, things he’s had in his closet because they were too nice to throw away, but didn’t fit him anymore. They did have some sentimental value, they were from peak of his youth and all that. It was hard. But knowing that someone else can use them, that made it possible. It made it a good thing, not an angst-driven purging.

And what that means, is that somewhere out there…there is a person who will find that jacket. That jacket that looks like it was made from the upholstery of my grandmother’s couch…and think it’s neat.

And that is why we donate.

Years ago, like more than 10 years ago, a guy I worked with made me a mix tape (remember those?). It had a bunch of stuff on it, nothing I’d ever heard before in my small-town-to-married-to-mother-to-single-working-mother lifetime. One of those things was Marilyn Manson, and we all know how that turned out…

But another band on there, I went years with having a song or two of theirs stuck in my head but I was never able to figure out who they were (once the cover from that tape was lost, so was the band info). With the advent of the innernets in my life, I finally figured it out.

And I’m kind of feeling like a dork, because the name of the band is kind of dorky, and some of their music is a little dorky – and I wont even get into their costumery. But then again, there are a bunch of songs that are really damn good. Example:

Ocean of Hunger (no real video, sorry)
or
Ice Planet Hell (no real video, but star wars!)
or

(again, no real video, but images of the band)

Anyway. I’ve had Ocean of Hunger stuck in my head for the last two weeks, finally looked up the lyrics and it turns out that even the line that was stuck in my head was totally wrong. But that’s ok. Now I know, maybe I can purge it from my mind for a while?

Or not.