I got to wondering today about bird omens.  My mother always said it was a bad omen if a bird came into the house or flew into a window.  Well, yeah, I would think so really.  A bird in the house has to be unlucky, not to mention messy and there isn't anything good to be said about having a bird do a body slam against your window.  That one seems fairly obvious.  I did wonder then why she kept parakeets; which would seem to be birds in the house.  Omens are mysterious things.

I wonder if I have experienced a bird omen.

As a smoker, my employer only allows me to indulge my addiction if I will descend into the cavernous depths of the building, to the cement-pillared dungeon of the parking garage.  It was on one such excursion that  my fellow addicts and I spotted a large leaf shaped like a bird sitting in the middle of the entrance way to the garage.  I moved closer to see this phenomenon and discovered it was actually a bird, disguising itself as a leaf.

It was alive.  But it was hard to tell how alive it might be.  I determined it was a female cardinal, which was somewhat exciting since I had never been so close to one.  It blinked its eyes.  That was about it on the movement scale.

The spot where it was resting, and the mirrored glass above the entrance way, made it fairly clear how it arrived here, stunned and immobile. I don't know where my usual concern for injured creatures went but for some reason, I had no reaction whatsoever.  A bird has a brain that is only about the size of a grain of sand, I reasoned.  If it runs its head smack into a wall, how much damage could that do?  I figured the bird was brain dead or concussed or possibly in a persistent vegetative state.  Nonetheless, using a box top, we gingerly moved it to a sunnier and grassier location, thereby making it easier for predators to snatch the paralyzed bundle of feathers.

Later that day it was gone.  The prevailing theory is that it recovered and flew away.  That's possible.  It could have regained only the ability to stagger and toppled over the nearby embankment. It could have been Fluffy the cat's lunch.  

But I wondered what sort of omen it was.  If a bird tries to fly where there is no sky but only a mirage of open space, and in so doing conks itself in the head and falls as dead at your feet pretending to be a leaf... what does that mean?  If it then revives and flies away to go on about its bird-brained business, is that a good omen?

I wonder if I do the same thing at times.  Am I staring into what I imagine is ahead, but perhaps  is only a reflection of what is behind me?  Maybe I project into the future based on what I have seen in my past.  Could it be I keep slamming my head into it because I cannot find a truly new direction?  Do I see an open way where there is only a solid and unyielding wall?

 Maybe all it means is that birds have brains about the size of grains of sand and it is not uncommon for them to fly breakneck into sky that isn't there.  Maybe it is a bad omen because it makes you look for meaning where none resides.

Some days, it would be nice to find meaning.  I wonder.  If I knew whether the bird had lived or died, I wonder if the meaning would find me.