Escape from Death Prom

I.

Here in the landlocked center of Ohio, I stood in a superstore parking lot and watched a dozen seagulls circle overhead, hunting for minnows or plankton or whatever seagulls eat. Their rusty squawks filled the night, and I wondered if something in nature was breaking. Then I remembered my parents' relationship with birds. My mother was a lapsed Catholic who kept the church at a distance. My father never talked about god, at least not until the end. But they both believed in birds.

My dad lost his mother to cancer when he was twenty-four. I never met her, but I know she loved the blue heron, a big swoopy thing that dragged its legs across the sky. When my parents spotted one, they'd pull the car to the side of the road and gawk. There she is, they'd whisper, and my father would bite his lip. It was the closest I saw him come to tears until the day my mother died.

My grandfather kept a stuffed bald eagle in his basement—an oddly seditious act. But he was delighted to show everyone the paperwork, including a letter with a presidential seal that confirmed the bird was legal. He’d found it on the beach with a broken wing and tried to nurse it back to health but failed. After he died, my father reported seeing bald eagles in improbable places. A parking lot in Chicago. Circling over the Detroit interstate.

My father's faith in birds deepened after my mother died. "Now she's a blue jay," he said. "Remember how excited she’d get when she saw the first one each spring?" He would call at strange hours with reports of blue jays. He saw one perched on the railing of the building where he moved after selling the house, and again on the hospital lawn after his lung transplant. Over the years, I became accustomed to the way he'd clear his throat to make space for his inventory of herons, eagles, and blue jays. These birds were plain facts to him, proof of a sensible universe where those who left did not leave us.

I realized too late that I never knew my father's favorite bird, and now there's nobody left to ask. But if I ever see a blue jay flying alongside another bird, maybe that's the one.

Perhaps it's more fruitful to contemplate the desire to believe, rather than worry about the shape it takes.

II.

But there is precedent for my parents’ faith: an ancient work called the Ornithogonia that describes the transformation of humans into birds may have inspired Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

In this poem, Ovid mourns the lost ages of gold and silver, when people were decent, magic filled the world, and the gods were good. He was nostalgic in the year 8.

Holding onto the past is not a good look, although it’s tempting. I struggle to separate the flux of 2025 from the standard-issue complaints of middle age. But ‘normal’ disappeared a long time ago; it’s not coming back, and good riddance—it's time to clear the stage and put on a better show.

Death Prom is not nostalgic. Squint your ears through the reverb and the exhausted fumes of the past might fuel a new mystery. Old standards by Elvis Presley and Bobby Vinton decay into digital artifacts, leaving behind an interesting residue that makes room for moments like M83’s "Moon Child", which sounds like the exhaust of history plunging into the future, come what may. At any rate, it’s the perfect soundtrack for when the heavens come crashing down. Listen below, or right-click + save-file-as and let this artisanal mp3 take root in the soil of your hard drive.