I feed a flock of wild doves. I have been doing this since I moved to Houston almost three years ago. I didn't choose the doves, the doves chose me. I just put food outside. Kind of like when someone is pregnant and they are asked do they want a baby boy or a baby girl and they say oh they will accept and love whole-heartedly whatever the baby is or like when you put a pot of dirt out and you don't plant anything in it and you just wait for God to blow a seed into it and whatever happens to grow there you cultivate. That's how the doves found me.
There are about twenty-five or thirty doves – mourning doves, Inca doves, white-winged doves – a smattering of sparrows and the occasional blue jay. Once in a while there is a cardinal. The cardinals don't come around much since I took down the aerial birdhouse on account of during hours of peak bird traffic a lot of seed would be spilled into the jasmine and philodendron and whatever remained uneaten would germinate into seedlings and smother the floor of the garden with a thick mat of roots robbing it of its nutrients and killing it. So I started just sprinkling it on the brick. Now, instead of being cooped up in some crazy birdhouse they are parading outside in the sun on the patio and I get to enjoy their eating and their parading. It is a mutual arrangement. If the sun comes up and I am still sleeping they start chirping for me to get out of bed. If I have forgotten to feed them they start knocking their wings against the windows for me to put aside my morning tea or so I like to imagine.
At first there were only eight or nine birds but the flock grew larger as I fed it. After about a year of feeding the flock stabilized at its current population. From outside the dove community the flock never ages. I know that baby doves grow into juveniles and juveniles grow into adults and adults build nests and make eggs and die but to non-doves like myself who don't recognize individual dove faces (You're so-and-so's young dove aren't you? My how you have grown!) and therefore can't follow a particular dove as it grows older and larger and especially since you only see them having breakfast and you never see the nests and the dying (Where do all the dead doves go I always ask myself?) the flock appears frozen in crystalline timelessness and seemingly never ages.
They always look the same. There is always at least one rowdy dove. When I open the window some are easily scared away and some are brave. I like it when a daddy sparrow cracks open a grain of millet with his beak and feeds fine splinters to a baby sparrow presumably his own. The pigeons arrive noisiliy and crowd everybody out. After they have dined on the coarser seed, they like to perch on the tray of herbs we hang on the railing of the second-floor balcony and observe the sparrows and the doves sharing their leftovers from their box seats of parsley and cilantro we make sure to wash carefully before eating.
So naturally I feel guilty when I have to be away from home for a few days. Every day I was in England I thought about the birds. I wondered if the flock would be hungry after six days. Of course they were hungry. If you were served breakfast for a hundred-and-eighty-days in a row and then all of a sudden breakfast stops and you don't know of any other place open for breakfast wouldn't you be chirping hungry too? I consoled myself with the notion that the deprivation would be good for the doves, would toughen them. It would caution them against their over-reliance on the pair of giant hands that feed them. Or it would kill them. Plus it was freezing cold.
When I came home from England I put out some bird seed. It usually gets cleaned out pretty quickly – by noon all the seeds have been eaten – but by morning the following day, the bird seed appeared untouched. Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday nothing. I feared for the worst. Sunday the sparrows returned chirping. Then today, Wednesday, I saw a dozen or so bobbing dove eyes peeking over the peak of the roof and welcomed them home with a smile. The doves are alive. I repeat. The doves are still alive. Maybe they were having breakfast with someone else this week. If so I am happy for them.