The Amazing Life of Birds by Gary Paulsen

Day One

    This morning I became twelve years and one week old and last night I had a disturbing dream. Don't worry. It wasn't about ELBOWS.
    I'd better explain. Lately I've been thinking a lot about the female body. Not in a weird or sick way but not in an artistic or medical way either. These thoughts aren't intentional. And they happen at the strangest times. I'll be sitting there, thinking of almost nothing, maybe about tightening my loose bicycle pedal, and there it will be, bang! Stuck in my mind: part of a woman's body. The part varies and I don't think it's necessary to say what it is—most readers can probably guess—but it's almost always embarrassing when this happens. Especially if you're sitting talking to, say, the math teacher Mr. Haggerston aboutequations and you look down and see not math equations on the paper but an enormous …
    You get the idea. So to avoid problems, when this happens I force my mind to think the word ELBOW and I see an ELBOW and think about ELBOWS and wonder about ELBOWS and wish about ELBOWS. It helps. Sometimes.
    Anyway, I had this disturbing dream about my father. In the dream he and I are sitting in a huge bird's nest watching a movie on television. The movie is
Ferris Bueller's Day Off.
Once a year since I was eight, my father makes me sit down and watch that movie with him.
    He thinks it helps us to bond. Which isn't necessary because we get along just fine anyway. My father is a good guy, and my mother is really nice too, and I even almost get along with my older sister, Karen. I'd do better with Karen if she weren't demon spawn born in the fires of Hades, but she's been that way as long as I can remember.
    But we have a good family. And I love them. Even my sister, I guess. We're all bonded as much as you can bond but still, once a year, my father sneaks out that old video. He and I watch it together and he proves once more that he Understands Young People and Knows What It's Like to Be a Boy.
    As if.
    All I can think when we sit there is in whatpossible world would I get a Ferrari to drive around Chicago in with a beautiful girl on my arm and go eat in fancy restaurants while the principal of my school gets munched on by a Rottweiler? I can't even get my bike pedal tightened without thinking about ELBOWS.
    But in the dream we're sitting in a bird's nest watching the movie and when it's over my father turns to me and puts his foot on my chest and says: “If you can ELBOW you can fly.” Only of course he doesn't say ELBOW but another word, not a body part.
    And he kicks me out of the nest.
    Even in the dream I
can't fly.
I plummet down and down, falling and falling until I suddenly wake up and see that I'm in my room holding the pillow like it's somebody I know really well.
    I know why I dreamed about the nest; a month ago two birds built a nest on the windowsill of my room, which is upstairs and in back by a tree. It seemed strange at first because there was the tree with lots of limbs, a much better place for a nest. But then I saw Gorm, the neighbor'stomcat, climb the tree and crawl out on the limb nearest the windowsill to try and reach the nest. Gorm is not the brightest chip in the matrix and instead of reaching the birds he rediscovered gravity, landing nicely on his feet but hitting as hard as a bowling ball because he's fat. In fact hekind of
looks
like a bowling ball. So that's why the birds used the windowsill. It's Gorm-proof.
    One of them laid an egg and sat on it until it hatched into the ugliest little dirty brown bird I have ever seen. Then they started to feed him. Or her. They brought it bugs and more bugs and still more bugs, both of them flying back and forth all the time getting food for the little eating machine.
    And now it's slightly bigger and still amazingly ugly, pink skinned and with bulging eyes. It has four brown scraggly feathers, two on the top of its head and two at its tail.
    The thing is they really love the little bugger, and preen it and feed