Saving the world

A sparrow, trapped behind an invisible glass barrier, flew straight up and across the room, headlong into apparently open sky, and fell to the floor at a startled cafe patron’s feet. I offered my garden hat to the small cadre of women who had flocked to rescue it. One of them scooped the stunned bird into my bonnet and took it outside.

It was mid-day in my lower Manhattan neighborhood. I had accompanied my friend Trina to the cafe, to hear the latest progress report on her four-year-old Schnauzer, Eloise, who is suffering from terminal cancer. She is my friend’s emotional touchstone, as well as her muse and companion. A recent prognosis gave Eloise only days or weeks to live.

Now, the sparrow was lying on its side, in a nearby planter, breathing fast, but not moving.

Long ago, one of my Irish ancestors had drilled into my soft skull the admonition that “A bird in the house means a death in the family.” Did that go for cafes too, I wondered? Trina assured me it did not. We left the sparrow as it seemed to gain consciousness, opening its eyes and moving its small head in that twitchy, birdlike way.

For a few years after 9/11, I found myself hunkering down against the media barrage of doom and gloom. Conceding defeat to the forces of Bush/Cheney after the invasion of Iraq (and Washington), I retreated to a more personal battle line, praying for the victims of this brutal war.

I found myself needing to divert my concentration to a more immediate, personal world. I set my Internet browser to entertainment news—only to find Paris Hilton’s sex life on my new, narrow-minded radar.

Time heals—and Paris Hilton turns sex into a perfume line.

But some of the world news was impossible to ignore: the tsunami in Indonesia, then Katrina here at home. Weather is the essence of personal news, getting our attention the way war can only envy.

And when they’re trying to run a power line down the most beautiful stretch of river I have ever seen, that got my attention, too.

Once you reach middle age, as I have, the formerly rare occurrence of a friend’s serious illness or death becomes all too common. I find it increasingly hard to rally to the challenge of comforting the bereaved or aiding the infirm. Global warming, the decay of our democracy, unregulated corporate power grabs, have become issues I can wrap my head around and hope to affect positively—more effectively, anyway, than the decaying organs of man and beast.

These thoughts were despairingly in my head as I came knocking at a neighbor’s door for a recent canine play-date. As I reported on the latest personal trauma, my neighbor, a practicing Buddhist, suggested I take my veil of doom elsewhere. Then, softening, she reminded me that death and illness are part of life, inevitable steps on the road to nirvana. Our dogs frolicked riverside as I soaked up enlightenment.

I used to think my mother’s friend Rosemary was a tragedy magnet. We would sit in her cheerful sunroom enjoying lemon drop cookies with a pot of Constant Comment tea, while she told the latest tale of local suffering.

Now I know it was just part of the territory, a natural result of being socially involved and of a certain age. Rosemary’s deep spiritual faith and love of life had helped her through a life full of personal pain, including the death of her vibrant teenaged daughter in a dormitory accident. When she hosted the separate wakes of my parents, decades apart, I found great comfort in her sturdiness in the face of death.

In much the same way, I find Al Gore’s sturdiness in the face of planetary catastrophe comforting. I left the movie theater after seeing “An Inconvenient Truth,” thinking I could buy a hybrid SUV and save Greenland from turning green. (It’s supposed to be white.)

Now, that’s change I can sink my teeth into. So watch out, power companies: the graying hordes of activists, hardened by personal loss, are out for saving the world, one river (or sparrow) at a time.