Lockdown in Spain-Day 18: Two deaths, sixty-five years apart

With death all about; on the tv news constantly, online if one doesn't studiously avoid it, sirens passing by periodically and rarely masked people seen on streets, one death has stood out in eighteen days.  I don't mean to dismiss the thousands of lives torn from gasping bodies or ignore the great or important people the world has lost, nor forget the nobodies who will hardly be missed.  The appalling enormity of the situation seems oddly remote to me having been isolated, for the most part, off a main street, down a private driveway and in a four unit building inhabited by neighbors with whom we won't talk because they are ignorant; others who don't associate with  us because we're foreigners and the last with whom we have nothing in common other than isolation.  It seems that tragedy is becoming the norm, and while I pray that it stays away from me and mine, I don't want to lose what little empathy I have left after my years "on the job". 

Could that be why I was moved so by the discovery of this baby sparrow on our garden table this morning?  We have been feeding the adults for some time now and they have become sort of pets, resting in the lemon or olive trees and using the birdbath I cobbled together. How it got there is a mystery to me.  There are no nests directly above, the closest building being about five meters away, and it could not have jumped or flown there.  Maybe a predator, such as a cowbird which we have in Maine, pulled it from its nest.  Do adult birds ferry their young around as mother cats do with kittens?

The discovery brought back a memory from San Francisco sixty-five years ago.  I was not quite eight, it being spring and just past hatching time.  I was dawdling down Guerrero Street trying to lengthen the walk home after school when I found a lightly feathered  chick, dead, on the sidewalk.  I scratched a grave for it at the base of a tree, fashioned a cross out of a couple of sticks, and probably said some sort of farewell.  The sticks were gone the next time I passed, but the location, from then on, was a sort of shrine to me. 

I buried this chick under the figurine of Ho Tai (Day 11) in the little shrine under my olive tree.