Brother Lawrence and the Chimney Bird

As I laid my cellphone on a bookshelf near the door and stepped outside into the late winter afternoon, I remember thinking, What can happen in just 30 minutes?

True, my wife’s due date for our first child was just a few weeks away. It’s also true this fact made me quiver on occasion like an over-bred hunting dog. I was a man with many worries, desperate to be updated and informed at all times, and so my cellphone went with me everywhere. On this day, though, more than anything I needed a head-clearing run through the neighborhood, so Ileft the phone behind—just this once.

A couple of miles later I came chugging up the hill toward my house. The stop sign that served as my finish line lay just ahead. I was approaching a state largely foreign to me—relaxation. That should have tipped me off. As if on cue, the screen door of my house burst open, and my wife appeared on the front stoop. She was yelling. For me. Good God, I thought, veering blindly across the road and up the driveway, What now? Is she sick? Is the baby on its way?

“Calm down,” my wife told me as I lunged, heaving and fearful, up the steps. “It’s not the baby. But we’ve got a problem. A bird just came down the chimney.”

To understand why the drama now unfolding is worth an essay, it helps to know how this day started—with an early morning dash to the emergency room. My wife awoke that Sunday morning with pain and soreness in her calf. Not a big deal, it seemed. But a quick call to the doctor yielded disturbing news. In a pregnant woman, these symptoms could be the sign of a blood clot. We went straight to the hospital, where we spent the morning talking with doctors and agreeing to various tests and mostly just cooling our heels in a little curtained room where I read the sports section four or five times. In the end, we were told it was just muscle spasms. We headed home much relieved; but to tell the truth, I had never been too worried from the start. This was rather astonishing for me, considering my family’s penchant for excessive worrying, which can be traced back to at least the Civil War and blamed for more than one nervous breakdown. How to explain this uncharacteristic calm? The credit went not to modern anti-anxiety medication but to a lowly cook from a 17th-century monastery.

It had been about a year since I’d stumbled upon This article appears in December 24 2007.