When I was a teenager my father caught a hummingbird.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t mean to say he chased the poor thing with a net; it wasn\u2019t that kind of catch. I was putting away the good china in the next room \u2013 or some such ordinary mundane thing \u2013 when I was suddenly aware of this terrible banging sound in the kitchen. It was summer, so the back door was open, and we became used to all manner of things coming through it, birds, bugs, and, most frequently, the neighbor\u2019s overly curious orange tabby cat. This time, it was a hummingbird. The poor thing must have found its way in through the back door and got turned around before it could remember how to fly back out again. So there it was, beating itself against the window like an oversized moth.<\/p>\n
There was no way I had the dexterity or the patience to capture a hummingbird, every time I made a move towards it, it skittered away from me. So I ran outside and told my parents that there was a hummingbird in the kitchen.<\/p>\n
To this day, I don\u2019t know how my father did it; he swears that he talked to it. My dad can \u2013 apparently \u2013 talk to birds. They somehow instinctively trust him, as if they know that this is a man who was never one of those children who would pull their feathers or break their wings.<\/p>\n
No matter how old I get, I never forget the sight of that little tiny bird cradled in my father\u2019s cupped hands. A tiny, living, jewel, with its tiny heart pounding in what must have been terror. He let us look at it for a minute, and then took it back out to the yard and let it go.<\/p>\n
From that day onwards, there have always been hummingbirds in our back garden.<\/p>\n
In the hustle and bustle and insanity that is my life these days. When my ship \u2013 both literally and metaphorically \u2013 hits rough water, when my heart gets broken or the drama gets to be too much, I often find myself thinking of that hummingbird\u2026<\/p>\n
Shipboard life is not easy. I really can\u2019t emphasis that enough sometimes. The work is hard and the hours are long, and there are times when even the finest team begins to come apart at the edges. Lines get crossed, boundaries get trod on, and emotions get crushed. The powers that be go on power trips (both subtle and not so subtle) and the A-deck crowd rebels in ways that would not even be noticeable to outsiders. In many ways we\u2019re a lot like high school (\u201cThe band hates the choir, the chess-club just wants to be left alone and hey, everyone hates the cheerleaders!\u201d); we are our own, ongoing, ever changing, soap-opera. All too often it is all too easy to find yourself feeling like that hummingbird, having winged in unknowingly from one world to the next, only to find yourself not quite sure how to get back to where you started.<\/p>\n
I count myself lucky, when I come down from the whirlwind of a contract, when my feet hit land and my world once again becomes temporarily solid and marginally predictable, there is always someone to show me the way back to the back garden.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I was a teenager my father caught a hummingbird. I don\u2019t mean to say he chased the poor thing with a net; it wasn\u2019t that kind of catch. I was putting away the good china in the next room … Continue reading