When I was a young boy, our family lived in a cozy, red brick house with white shutters in a small and sleepy Midwestern town. Summer was my favorite time of year. At bedtime, which was right around dusk, my mother would throw open my bedroom window, and I’d fall asleep listening to the rustling leaves of the giant maple tree just outside.

Our neighborhood was full of kids about my own age. In the summertime we’d squeeze every moment out of the day playing together, getting into as much trouble as grade school children could. The back yards we’d cut through were an enormous, tiger-infested jungle. For our secret fort, we used the (completely off limits) attic in our detached garage. We would capture lightning bugs in jars and set elaborate traps for rabbits (I don’t remember ever catching one). We’d dare the youngest in our group to ring the doorbell of the creepy old man on the corner who always wore overalls and walked with an exaggerated limp.

One evening about seven or eight of us heard a loud chirping in the maple tree by my bedroom. We discovered that robins had built a nest in the tree, low enough for us to reach after a short climb. In the nest were two small eggs. The mother, perched high in the tree, must have been chirping to scare us away; as we drew close to the nest, her chirping grew louder and more intense.

An older boy, Jim, who was a bully, started throwing stones at Mother Robin. She flew to the rooftop next door, but continued chirping. A debate began about what to do with the eggs.

“Let’s break ‘em!” someone shouted.

“Let’s take ‘em and see if they hatch!” another suggested.

Something seemed wrong about my friends deciding what would happen to the eggs, which had been found, after all, in my tree. I felt a vague sense of ownership, but I just stood there. The other kids were mostly older, and seemed bent on destruction. My mom and dad, who were within shouting distance in the house, might have come to the rescue, but I didn’t call out.

At some point Jim grabbed the eggs and smashed them on the sidewalk in front of our house, leaving a slimy, brownish-yellow mess on the concrete. The kids started poking at it with sticks. After a while they lost interest and scattered. And there I was all alone, staring at the sidewalk, shamed and nervous, as if I had committed a terrible crime. It was dusk. Time for bed.

Mom tucked me in and threw open the window. I could not bring myself to tell her what had happened, though I wanted to. Standing at the bedroom door, she said, “What is wrong with that bird?”

Outside my window Mother Robin was chirping, but not the kind of chirp you’d ever want to hear. What was emanating from her tiny, innocent beak was the loudest and most agonizing noise I had ever heard. Mother Robin was crying.

Her shrieking was the sound of unendurable pain — and an accusation. Every new outburst overwhelmed me with guilt and sadness and regret. I pulled the covers over my head. Mother Robin was talking to me. She said, what had happened could never be undone, could never be forgiven.

I don’t remember whether I cried myself to sleep that night, or if I slept at all. Though many decades have passed, and I have thought of a hundred ways to explain away what happened that night, Mother Robin’s crying is never far from me. When I know my heart is in the right place, her crying is soft. When I stumble into selfishness and indifference, it is very, very loud.
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What childhood memories stick with you?

This post is part of Robert Hruzek’s latest What I Learned From … group project, now co-sponsored by the High Calling blog.