Several weeks have passed since that summer day when I received a frantic phone call at work from my wife. There had been an accident, she said, and knowing the three rowdy Austin boys were home with her that day, I assumed one or more was in some sort of distress. An eyeball hanging out of its socket, a knee bent backwards, singed hair – these are common fare for the horror movie aficionado and for the parents of elementary-school aged (and younger) boys.

Wondering why she called me instead of the folks at 911, I asked what sort of emergency prompted the call. Perhaps realizing that she’d unintentionally scared me out of my wits (since I’m a half-wit on my best day, this is not something that takes much effort), she quickly assured me that this emergency could probably wait until the end of my workday.
“There’s a bird in the basketball pole,” she said.

A what in the where?

“A bird has fallen down into our basketball pole,” she repeated. “It’s a bluebird, and it’s stuck at the bottom of the pole. We hear it scratching the sides trying to claw its way out.”
Ever compassionate (except where his younger brothers are concerned), our oldest son had stuffed a worm into a dime-sized hole at the bottom of the pole, and was going to pour in a glass of water as well, but Torre caught him before he could unintentionally drown the bird in its sorrows.

By 6:00 that evening, word of our woebegone bird friend had spread. My parents arrived, bringing the necessary tools for this massive extraction effort: Ice cream treats from Dairy Queen. Our dear neighbors – Hugo, Nancy, Xavier and Chloe – had also heard of the bird’s flightless plight, and they, too, arrived bearing ice cream.

I had already devised a simple plan for the rescue effort. I would remove the nuts from the anchor bolts at the bottom of the pole. Hugo and I would then tilt the pole gently backward, allowing the bird to hop out of the large hole at the lower end of the hollow pole and fly to freedom. After that: more ice cream.

The only flaw in the plan was our discovery that there was, in fact, no hole at the bottom of the pole. The mounting bracket at the very bottom of the pole covered the hole, which meant our little bluebird would have to climb out through the top of the pole. That was 10 feet of darkened metal tubing he would have to navigate, and the only way to start the poor thing on his journey to freedom was to scare his tailfeathers off. So we banged on the pole and made cat noises and recited poems about bluebirds baked in a pie.

Eventually, out popped our bluebird – shaken, stirred and a little messy. He hopped about in the yard, trying to get his bearings and escape the horde of caramel-covered children that was chasing him with squeals of delight. He dashed around our yard and sprinted toward the cover of bushes in our flower bed, and we began to wonder if our little bird was unable to fly and might fall prey to a cat or a lawn mower or a one-year-old with misanthropic tendencies.

We tracked him into the neighbor’s yard, and just as we were considering whether to catch this bird – and then what, exactly, would we do with him? – or let the fates decide his future, the little guy took flight. It wasn’t exactly a breathtaking event; in truth, he had a lot of wobble in that first flight. But that he could indeed take wing was the sign we’d been hoping to see.

With our blue little friend now safer and sounder, we turned our collective attention toward resolving the next crisis (and there’s always a next crisis).

“Hey, the ice cream is melting!”