Let that bird fly
I ran into my guru in the park this morning, the mayor of the neighborhood, and we were talking about my mother’s grave, and angels, and dogs, and all of the symbols and portents we put on things in our lives. He was telling me about an object his wife had wanted that she didn’t get when her parents died and she had a hard time getting over the loss. A friend said, “Let that bird fly” and that is just another way, in New Orleanese, of saying like the monk did, “I left that woman there at the fence, so should you.”
Maybe the old woman who lives on the bayou who said she has no thing for history has something right – maybe today is our time and yesterday, we were a different person. I was thinking about this as last night we watched A Single Man, Tom Ford’s movie with Colin Firth, which was a cry fest. A 16 year relationship ends in a death. How do you get over the grief, the sadness or like song asks, How do we divide our home, our hearts? In the words of Tony Soprano, you wipe the tears from your eyes and “you pick up the pieces and you go on.”
You let that bird fly.