by Richard Meese

Created on: April 12, 2009

A MOTHER'S INSTINCTS

I didn't notice the nest right away.

My wife pointed it out after I got home from work. Leading me to a beam holding up the awning in our tiny courtyard, she pointed out a tuft of twigs and needles delicately balanced on the narrow two by four and marveled at the intricacy of its interlaced patterns. I just saw a bunch of garbage on my beam and wanted to knock it down. Fear of offending nature (and more importantly, my wife!) kept my hands in my pockets. Returning from work the next evening, I met the artist in residence, a tiny bird squatting on her creation. In the shadows, I could make out one black eye fixed on me. In the absolute stillness that followed, we sized each other up as potential threats and came to an unspoken understanding. She would stay on her side of the courtyard and I would stay on mine. My wife told me this was sensible, since birds have been known to attack anyone that goes near their nest.

If there is one thing all humans share, it is a shared reverence for a mother's instinct to protect her young and as of this writing, I still consider myself a human, so I did my part and avoided mommy bird as best I could. Still, looking at that one black marble night after night in the gloaming of early evening, I kept thinking back to a time when I was in need of a mother's protection.

It was the spring of 1964 and I was a nine year old boy living in Hawaii. (It might have been summer, but it really doesn't make any difference because every day in Hawaii is the same - perfect!) My Dad was an Army officer stationed in Korea and my mother lived with my brother, my sister and me on a dead end street in Aliamanu, a suburb of Honolulu. It was a great time and place to be a kid. My block was filled with Samoan kids, Filipino kids and Haoles (white kids like me) and we all played together and hung out together unaware of our ethnic differences. I think the fact that we were all barefoot and never wore shoes might have been the unifying element in our egalitarian subculture, but I could be wrong. Maybe it was the tropical fruit. We had a papaya tree in our front yard and our neighbors have guava trees and mango trees and every other kind of fruit you could think of. And it was all free and we all shared. It's pretty hard to be mad at someone from another culture when you're sucking on the same fruit all day. At least that's my theory.

In any case, I was sitting on the front porch of our rented house one morning, fiddling with a sealed

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