The desert cardinal.
It sings and behaves almost exactly like its scarlet cousins. It never flies away from seasonal changes or difficult weather, and it also tolerates drier conditions than its bright red family members.
Why do you need to know that? Because I am a birdbrain. I connect things that are totally unlike each other. I am a surrealist. And for me, being a cardinal is all about never flying away when the winter comes, never giving up.
There was a time in my life when I wasn’t entirely sure of who I would become. Let me say clearly, “I am not now, nor have I ever been a homosexual.” And if I had been one, like a couple of my friends turned out to be, I would not be ashamed to be one. But there was a time, in my high school years, when I really wasn’t certain, and I was terrified of what the answer might be.
And it was in high school that I met Dennis.
Now, to be honest, I noticed him while I was still an eighth grader, and he was in my sister’s class and two years younger. It was in the locker room after eighth grade P.E. class was ended and sixth grade P.E. was getting dressed for class. I was returning to pick up a book I had left. He was standing just inside the door in nothing but shorts. The feeling of attraction was deeply disturbing to my adolescent, hormone-confused brain. I didn’t want to have anything to do with that feeling. But I felt compelled to find out who he was anyway. He was the younger brother of my classmate Rick Harper (not his real name). In fact, he was the book end of a set of twins. But I came to realize that it was Dennis I saw, not Darren, because they were trying to establish their identities by one of them curling his hair, and the other leaving his straight.
Nothing would ever have come of it, but during my Freshman year of high school, I encountered him again. During a basketball practice where the ninth grade team was scrimmaging with the eighth graders, the seventh graders were all practicing free throws at the side of the junior high gym. While I was on the bench, he came up to me from behind and tapped me on the shoulder. I turned around and he tossed me his basketball. “Play me one on one?” He asked. I almost did. But I remembered that Coach Rod had warned us to be ready to go into the game when he called on us. I had a turn coming up. So, I told him that and promised I would play him some other time. He grinned at me in a way that gave me butterflies in my stomach. Why? To this day I still don’t really know.
Dennis’s older brother and I were in Vocational Agriculture class together that year and both on the Parliamentary Procedure team preparing for a competition. We were at Rick’s house. After a few rounds of practice that convinced our team we would definitely lose the competition, Dennis and his brother trapped me in a corner.
“Hey, Meyer, how’re ya doin’?” Dennis said. Darren just stared at me, saying nothing.
“It’s Beyer, not Meyer,” I said. Of course, he knew that. The Meyers were a local poor family with a bad reputation, and it was intended as an insult. And it also rhymed, making it the perfect insult.
“Still one of the worst basketball players ever?”
“I try. I’m working on it really hard.” That got him to laugh and ask me to give him a high five.
“Goin’ to the basketball game later?”
“Yeah, probably.”
I knew then that he wanted to be my friend. I wasn’t sure why. He was picking me out of the blue to make friends with. We didn’t move in the same circles, go to the same school, or even live in the same town. He was a Belmond boy, I was Rowan kid. And he didn’t know I was only a few years past being sexually assaulted and not ready to face the demons my trauma had created within me.
Later, at the basketball game, he found me in the bleachers and sat down beside me. In my defense, I am not a homophobe. And neither he nor I turned out to be a homosexual. He just wanted to be my friend and was taking difficult steps to make that connection. He was the one taking the risks. I greeted him sarcastically, and looking back on it, somewhat cruelly, because I was filled with too many uncertainties. I never meant to drive him away. But I will never forget the wounded look on his face as he scooted away down the bleacher seat.
He tried to talk to me several times after that. He apparently never lost the urge to befriend me. But as much as I wanted to accept his friendship, it never came to be. I have regretted that ever since.
Dennis passed away from cancer early this year. It is what made me think about who we both once were and what I gave away. I went on to actually befriend a number of boys through college and into my teaching career. I never chose any of them. The friendship was always their idea. I went on teach and mentor a number of fine young men. I like to think I did it because I felt a bit guilty of never really being Dennis’s friend. I hope somewhere along the way I made up for my mistake. I hope Dennis forgives me. And I wish I could tell him, “I really do want to be your friend.”
The pyrrhuloxia is a member of the family of cardinals and grosbeaks. And it does not migrate away from troublesome seasons and bad weather. There is dignity in being a pyrrhuloxia.
Catch a Falling Star 
Mickey Predicts… Uh, Oh!
I have lately been watching YouTube videos about science fiction writers like Jules Verne, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke. These are visionary writers who predicted many things about future applications of science and technology.
Verne foresaw nuclear submarines, expeditions into the interior of the planet, and men setting foot on the moon. Asimov predicted much of what we must deal with in terms of robots and thinking machines with artificial intelligence. And Clarke envisioned satellites and how they could be used for communications and other things we are currently doing in a massive way. He wrote the story that the movie 2001 a Space Odyssey is based on.
So, now Mickey has to get in on the prediction bandwagon too. After all, he thinks he is a science fiction writer too, foreseeing things like rabbit people, de-evolution machines, and time-travel gloves.
The disturbing thing is, however, that much of what Mickey sees in the near future is rather bleak. We have a sinister tendency to live our current lives in very stupid ways. Rich industrialists like the Koch brothers, Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos put profits in the short term over the safety, welfare, and lives of people, even the people who made them wealthy. Because you can make money faster by not worrying about how you may be changing and polluting the environment, you are turning the planet into a hothouse of unbreathable gasses and toxic chemicals.
Since we are entering a time with rising oceans, we are going to have to work at not only de-acidifying the ocean water and restoring fish and other aquatic life, but becoming sea-dwellers ourselves. We will be living in underwater cities. We will travel in underwater cars powered by solar-charged batteries. We will wear scuba gear to school. And we will need to invent aqualungs that extract oxygen and nitrogen from the water.
We will also need to develop environmental suits even to live on the land in the toxic atmosphere. We will all be like Ironman, all living safely inside our Swiss-army, all-purpose, and internet-connected Ironman suits.
And many of us will become Martians… or Venusians… living on other planets in the solar system.
Of course, we will have to do something about all the stupid people. Ideally, we would solve our aversion to educating kids to think for themselves, and take advantage of all the educational methods that really do work to make everybody into a self-sufficient, competent, and intelligent individual.
But since rich folks don’t like the idea of sharing what they accumulate with other, less-economically-fortunate people, there will probably be some kind of eugenics-based program to exterminate all the lower-class people that will no longer be needed to polish shoes or hand-make widgets for the wealthy. Being wealthy does not automatically make you a good person, even though most of them think that it is so.
And of course, there will have to be some progress on the matter of artificial intelligence. If terminator-style robots are just going to carry pretty sleeping girls around with them for decorative effects, we will have to figure out, “How are we going to treat them as people too?”
After all, they will all be much smarter than us. Even if we are rich. And we have to acknowledge the fact that they will have decided that they didn’t need to terminate all of us in order to make the world a much better place.
So, I guess that sorta proves that Mickey can do the science-fiction-y thing of predicting the future too. But we should ask ourselves the question, “Do we really want him to?”
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