To Love a Dove

Castles in the Sky #52

Note: I had originally turned off comments on this on accident; they are now back on.

My completely normal Tuesday morning was upended when I decided to forego the drive-through and instead walk inside the Starbucks down the street from my house. A few paces in front of the door was a man who looked to be in his late 40s wearing the kind of comfortable business casual someone in tech or IT might wear, holding his hand up in front of his chest as he sat to wait for his coffee. 

On his hand was perched a white bird. 

I could not contain myself. My brows were knit the entire drive to Starbucks, but once I realized the man had a bird inside, my face burst into a smile. I was giddy like a child. It shocked me that the other dozen people in the coffee shop had yet to swarm the man and ask about his bird. “Wow,” I kept saying in the loud, drawn-out way I’d been rehearsing for the last year by remarking on things my toddler would bring to me. 

I ordered my coffee. “One venti coffee . . . what? Yeah, whatever is brewing . . . hey–do you see that bird? What’s up with that bird?” The barista feigned intrigue but was not curious. 

I sat down next to the man and held it together for all of five seconds. 

“What kind of bird is that?” 

“Oh, it’s a dove.” He said. The dove cooed. 

“Wow,” I said again. “Wow. That’s so . . . that’s cool.” 

“Thank you.” 

“How do you keep it from flying away?” 

“Oh, he loves to be on me, he doesn’t fly away. Usually, he’s on my shoulder so I can use both my hands.” 

“Amazing,” I said. The whole time we’ve been talking I’ve been nodding and smiling from ear to ear like a Disney World animatronic. 

“I work from home,” the man said, “so I got the bird, and he stays in my office, and I talk to him.” 

What was I feeling? Was it love? I can’t explain how I knew but this man and this dove loved each other. 

“What’s his favorite place?” 

“He actually loves driving in the car. That’s when he cooes the most.” 

The barista calls my name and my drink is ready. I freeze. What do I say, thanks? Nice to meet you? Do I get his contact info? For what? To see his dove again? Do I just stick around and talk? I wasn’t sure what to do, so I just did what I normally do and grabbed my drink, smiled, and waved the man and his bird goodbye. 

When I got home, I ran into my house and woke up my wife with that kind of staccato reporting that little kids do when they’re excited like, “dude! I was at Starbucks! And I saw a dove! It was on this guy’s hand! And he let me take a picture! And the dove is his friend  . . .” After a few minutes of this, I realized my wife was too sleepy to muster the enthusiasm I was looking for, so I let her go back to bed. 

This kind of thing happens a lot in my life—not seeing a dove, but letting something small expand in my mind and captivate my curiosity for days on end. This is how psychological richness manifests in my life.

And as much as I’ve written about psychological richness, I usually do so in an expository way. I will explain its origins in an academic psychology paper in 2021, and then try to define it: “Psychological richness refers to the depth and diversity of one’s mental and emotional experiences, characterized by a variety of novel, perspective-changing experiences.” 

This is a more realistic example of how it’s not simply intellectual. Ideas and experiences will take hold of my mind. The man and his dove occupied my thoughts all day after leaving Starbucks and they’ve continued to occupy my thoughts in the days since then. 

I went about my daily work: answering emails, grading student work, and reviewing books to put on my online bookstore. Yet all that time, I would think back to the man and his dove. 

Why a dove? How did he first get the dove? What was their routine?

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He sat in his home office, legs aching, eyes straining, snack wrappers on the desk, closing out of his last Zoom meeting of the day. He’d been alone in his apartment for the last four months, isolated by the lockdown. Sandra, his coworker, went on and on about the dog she’d adopted to make the lockdown less unbearable. After his fortieth night in a row of eating a readymade meal from the grocery delivery, he said he would mask up and venture to the pet store. There was only one problem: he hated dogs. 

Hate might be a strong word, but he was afraid of them. Ever since getting chased down the street by a stray when he was a child. He could tolerate dogs but was never comfortable around one. He couldn’t imagine it would make his life easier. But he was desperate. The lockdowns had started as a soft mist but he was now drowning. 

Entering the pet store went as expected. His mother had died five years earlier but she was an overprotective hypochondriac. So he lined his N-95 with a light adhesive in his car before putting it on, and ritualistically sanitized his hands before and after touching anything. 

The actual pet store was a cacophony. He stepped back into a small nook in the store for protection from the crowd. There were sad dogs barking and a few small kittens rolling around in glass cubbies on the wall. The pets were loud enough on their own but the store was overrun with families with small children, banging on the windows and tapping. He thought of his own childhood, preferring to stick by his parents at outings, sticking to a very small group of friends, intent to be alone with books and computers. 

His mother was protective–brusque even–with the outside world but warm and tender to him. His father was the opposite: firm with him and jovial to the outside world. One night when he was eleven or twelve after pretending to be asleep so he could read a Phillip K. Dick novel under the covers, he overheard his parents in a hushed argument, and his father asked, “why doesn’t he have more friends?” 

“He has us!” His mother snapped back. He could feel her anger through two walls. His eyes welled with love for his mother and his ears burned hot with shame that he was so socially defective that his mother needed to defend him even to his father. Almost forty years later, he felt echoes of those same emotions as he daydreamt in that pet store. Suddenly through all the other noise, a beautiful, subtle warble pierced his awareness. 

He turned to see a birdcage with a single white dove. Was that the dove? He asked himself. The dove turned to the side so that one eye was looking directly at him, and they both stood there like that for a minute, and slowly the noises and chaos of the rest of the pet store came back to him. The anxiety of the place started to suffocate him and he turned to take his first step to leave when the dove cooed again. 

He looked right at the bird. Its coo had this magical effect, where he felt seen and heard. The rest of the room fell away. 

He would buy the bird. 

The store attendant was a teenager who said that the bird had already been reserved by a family that was coming in later that day. The man resigned himself to not going home with the bird. 

But then the bird cooed. 

The man recalled with shame how his father said he would not allow him to study graphic design, so he became an IT professional. He recalled how every teacher he ever had mispronounced the name his parents had given him from their old country. He recalled the way that the funeral home director had misprinted his mother’s birthday on the memorial card.

And in none of these scenarios had he ever spoken up. 

“I will pay you $100 cash for the bird.” The man practically shouted through his mask. 

The teenager looked surprised. “The bird only costs $60, and it’s been reserved.” 

“No,” the man said, “I’ll buy the bird for $60 and I’ll pay you $100 cash to let me leave with it now.” The man pulled his sanitizer from his pocket, sanitized his hands, and took the $100 out to pay the teenager. 

The teenager’s eyes went wide and he took the $100. “The family is late anyway, come with me.” 

His work suffered a bit over the next month, but he had been such a relentless overachiever before that nobody noticed. He disabled the monitoring software on his laptop and watched YouTube videos all day about caring for doves. He ordered a stack of books from Amazon on raising and caring for birds and bird psychology. 

He named the dove Bo. And the man loved Bo.

For two years, Bo was his best friend. Bo moved from his perch onto the man’s shoulder. His work got better because he would talk through his problems with Bo, who would occasionally coo encouragement. He would laugh to Bo, or complain to Bo, and Bo was always there to hear it. He mounted a birdcage on his bicycle and would take Bo around the neighborhood. He began taking Bo on drives and even on errands with him around town. 

And Bo loved the man. 

The man was there when the light came in the morning. The man brought Bo food and gave Bo a place to perch. The man cooed to Bo and received Bo’s coos. The man shared his quiet home with Bo and protected Bo when they left. Bo always had a place to perch when the man was around. 

Things were perfect, for them. Not everything works out the way it should. A bird ‘should’ be in the sky and a man ‘should’ be among people. But sometimes something not working out the way it should is the best solution that could happen. 

And this is how they both felt that day in the car, on their way to Starbucks.  

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My name is Charlie Becker and I’m a writer, teacher, and bookseller. Every Friday, I send out Castles in the Sky, a newsletter where I write the weirdest that feels right. If someone emailed this to you or you found it on social media, go here to learn more.

Rabbit Holes

Rabbit holes are diversions and digressions that I think add to the main essay above.

Lucinda by Thomas Bartlett

I was originally going to write this story as a romance about a woman who buys her introverted boyfriend a dove and call the story “Loving the Doveman.” I went in a different direction but while I was researching I googled “Doveman” to see what would come up, and found a producer named Doveman who composed this song for the piano: 

 The experience of seeing the dove was wild and childlike, but the daydreams about the doveman’s life were much more sentimental and subdued. In an amazing coincidence, I feel like this song really captures the mood of those daydreams and the story that came from it. 

Bulletin Board

Bulletin Board is where I include meta-news, personal updates, and shout-outs.

In an amazingly cool coincidence, I stumbled upon the creator of the TikTok video that inspired the last issue of Castles in the Sky on Twitter. I shared it with him and he liked it! See the Tweets here: 

There were too many beautiful comments for which I’m grateful on the last issue to post them all here, but I want to thank everyone who read it. 

Thanks for reading!