Nests

I have been watching a robin in the backyard garden gathering tendrils of dried-out flox for a nest.   It repeatedly jabs its beak like a piston into the tangle, each time extracting a two-to-four inch sprig, until, beak-filled, it flies off.  Using that flox, along with the grass and twigs and mud procured from hundreds of forays, the robin will weave and mortar the nest, shaped it into a bowl by pressing against it with its chest, and line with soft grass.  A wispy smile would play upon the lips of even the most dour Puritan at such industry.

Every year a robin builds a nest on my house, either in the angle of one of the decorative brackets under the roof eaves or atop the front porch support pillars.  No doubt my house is on some Turdus migratorious AAA guidebook.  A five-star avian roost.  And each time a robin chooses my dwelling for a dwelling, each time my house is tenanted by this herald of spring, I feel somehow honored, elected, as if  I was examined and judged and found a hospitable host worthy of trust.

*     *     *

Quite early on the morning of my younger brother’s wedding I sat in my folks’ kitchen drinking coffee.  My mom soon joined me.

“You know,” she said, “I had the strangest dream.”

“You did?”

“Yeah.  I dreamed we had a goldfish bowl with two goldfish in the family room.  One morning I noticed that one of the goldfish was missing.  I was going to ask you if you knew anything about it, but you weren’t in your bed.  I woke your father, but he said you hadn’t been in that bed for a long time.  And then, another morning I saw that the other goldfish was gone.  Isn’t that strange?”

“Well, mom, I think you should seek psychological counseling without delay.  I’m kidding.  Actually, you don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to interpret that dream.  I’d say it means you’re feeling some anxiety about empty nest syndrome.  First me, and now Dennis, and that means no more children at home.”

“You think?”

“Yeah, I think.”

Empty Nest Syndrome, despite its prevalence as a common cultural metaphor for the  apprehension, distress, even depression parents sometimes experience when children leave home, is not a recognized psychological disorder.  It does not appear in the DSM-V, so it goes without saying that neither does mom’s metaphorical spinoff, empty goldfish bowl syndrome.  Still, mom and dad did rent out the bedroom my brother and I shared to two college girls the first year after my brother’s wedding.  After that, they bought a cat, a Siamese, for which my mom, four nights a week, warmed liver in the oven, and my dad built a perching shelf in front of the living room window.  “She likes the liver warm,” mom explained.  “She likes to see what’s going on outside,” dad explained.

 *     *     *

I am a nester.  A homebody.  A hibernator, my wife Kathy says, though, in my defense, that is only in the winter and only because I have no tolerance for cold.  I do not suffer from agoraphobia.  I enjoy being outside, and besides, nine months of the year I venture out five days a week to teach at Graceland University, so I suffer from neither didskaleinophobia, the fear of school, nor enochlophobia, the fear of crowds.  I savor a meander through forests and other natural settings, on paths beaten and unbeaten, so I am not beleaguered by hylophobia.  I travel, so I am not beset by hodophobia, though I will, under no circumstances, board an airplane.  I’d sooner grab a shark’s dorsal fin and hitch a ride, and I’m not too keen on sharks, selachophobia having set in thanks to Steven Spielberg.   So, OK, I have aviophobia, but I’m in good company: Aretha Franklin, Jennifer Aniston, David Beckham, Colin Farrell, Ben Affleck, Whoopi Goldberg, John Madden, and Martin Scorsese do, too.

My nesterdom is a preference, not a phobia.  I prefer surroundings where I feel most at ease, most comfortable, where I experience a fitted-into-ness, a settled-into-ness; I prefer the familiar.  Most people do, I suspect.  I see no problem with that as long as one is willing to expand one’s area of familiarity.  It’s a matter of overcoming the fear of the initial fear of making a strange place familiar.  I have been able to, but, I admit, with reluctance.  Still, I prefer the woven twigs and grasses of home.  They are stitched with settledness, mortared with security.

*     *     *

When I was a kid, the term “birdbrain” was an insult.  It’s an inaccurate insult, however, because it mistakes size for capacity.  Despite brains that contain, on average, 100 million neurons (dogs, average 600 million; humans 85 billion), and despite lacking a neocortex, birds form concepts; understand the mental states of other birds; create and use tools; possess memory, though not a particularly deep one; learn vocalizations from other birds, a form of cultural, not genetic, transmission; know thousands of sound combinations; and communicate specific meanings to convey specific intentions.

It’s likely, however, that birds have no psychological sense of self, no sense of agency in which they experience themselves acting and causing events as distinguished from events that happen beyond their control.  My nest-building robin felt no maternal devotion animating her four-chambered heart; none of its 570 beats per minute skipped at the thought of hatching her nestlings.  In building her nest, she applied no architectural knowledge, brought no geometry to bear.  The architecture and geometry are built in; she simply follows a genetically-ordained script.  She requires nothing of herself.  She does what she has to do.

It’s interesting that, in human beings, doing what has to be done is extolled as noteworthy, even, at times, heroic, while in my robin it is dismissed  as a mindless series of preprogrammed mental subroutines.  The difference is that humans can choose not to do what needs to be done.  Unlike my robin, we can swerve and stray, we can harden our hearts and close minds, we can tumble into furrows of intolerance and mistrust, be romanced by selfishness, by cruelty, by injustice.  And yet we mostly don’t.  And that is our glory.  My robin can be nothing more than what it is.  We can be less, and not being less makes us more.