Sequi Veritas

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A bird or a bandit

There is a redbud tree just outside the front door of our house. It is  mature and provides porch shade for shrubs during the hot months. Our standing mailbox sits nearby. 

Midway up the trunk of the tree, some four feet from the ground, there is a four inch hole where an old branch had been. 

A mother bluebird used the hole to raise her young last spring. She did her job, but predator creatures were always about, which caused me to chase them away when they neared. To dissuade her nesting this year I placed two stick flags in the small hole, an American red, white and blue and a University of Missouri flag. Both were easy to see from our living room where I vegetate.  

On a visit outside my wife returned to me couch-potatoing and handed me the Missouri flag, stickless. “I found it in the street. Your American flag is gone. Haven’t you been sitting by the front window with shutters cracked open? You didn’t see anyone take them?”

I was baffled. I’d just seen them whisking about hours earlier. “All I saw was the mailman walking by.”

“Well, it’s probably kids,” she said.

My suspicious mind began ticking. “Could be. But I haven’t seen any around. Was school called off today?” 

I quickly began investigating the front yard, looking up in the trees for bird or squirrel bandits. The soft cloth would make nice bedding for any creature. I knew we had crows in the neighborhood, but I eliminated them because I’d heard they only steal shiny objects. 

I put it on my list to search our backyard and the creek area for evidence. The notion presented itself that the whole act of taking the flags was a boundary violation regardless of who the perpetrator was; especially given the flags’ close proximity to our house, not to mention the occurrence in the middle of the day.

If taking the flags was done by a feathered friend or one of the furry kind, that was excusable. If, however, the crime was committed by one of the two legged varieties, that presented a new conundrum.  

I needed to know. My angst set me ruminating. I grew up across the street from a house where a murder occurred, unsolved to this day. I was reminded of sequi veritas, pursue truth, which stuck with me from my high school freshman Latin, taught by the kindly Ms. Crawford.  

As an obscure writer of paperback mysteries, some of which are gathering dust on the back shelves at Amazon warehouses, my nature is to search. Usually, I have no endings to my novels when beginning a book. The thrill is finding clues along the way and laying them out in the chapters. My writing modus operandi  is likely not endorsed by the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. My books aside, there is another neighborhood mystery perplexing me, that of the dinosaur bird. 

It was dawn, and I was walking Bella, our Pyrenees mix, down a nearby cul-de-sac which backed up to woods. A London fog had set in.   

Ten feet up Bella and I heard big wings flapping. Outlined in the dense mist, flying from a tall Hickory to the creek encapsulated in a kind of orb fluid was what appeared to be a prehistoric-looking bird; ten times the size of our owls and hawks. We watched it melt into the trees, disappearing. Bella quickly turned back toward our house, forgoing her morning constitutional in her favorite place. I studied the surroundings for its return, but it was gone.

I shook my head. Was what Bella and I saw an optical illusion due to the fog or something paranormal, or just my hopeful imagination? 

How many mysteries of disappearing flags and dinosaur-looking birds flying in an orb fluid are there?

I went to the internet to get a low-down and found a listing for the shoebill of Uganda, the only prehistoric looking bird still living. Also, I found a chat post about ghosts shapeshifting in the form of a bird, as messengers between the physical and spiritual world. But nothing specific to shed light on what Bella and I had witnessed.

I did find a notation for a kid’s game ‘stealing the flag’ but no reference about flag thefts from redbud trees.

My puzzlement over the disappearance of flags and a momentary glimpse of a strange creature in the sky pales to the mysteries of the Bermuda Triangle and Jack the Ripper unsolved crimes. But such occurrences are happening all around us. If one is so possessed to seek answers to these, a bloodhound nature is needed.  

Fifty percent of murders in the U.S. go unsolved. The myriad of lesser crimes unsolved is greater. The Buddhists and the Stoics philosophize to accept life’s uncertainty and work to understand the dichotomy of control, realizing what is and what isn’t within one’s capacity to fix.

Raymond Chandler, who created the Phillp Marlowe detective novels, said “the story is in man’s adventure for the hidden truth.”  One has to go through a lot of swinging doors to find it.

Bella and I have visited the cul-de-sac many times since, but no big bird. We will continue to look toward the heavens.

I will round up all the usual suspects for the missing flag case.

In the meantime, I’ll stick another red, white and blue in the redbud hole and be on the lookout.