My dad sat quietly on a chipped azure bench, blue eyes watching the tide like an old friend. Weathered hands tugged at the corners of a thread-worn, teal blanket wrapped securely around shoulders, once broad and strong, now narrowed and bent. White hair and a wayward beard blew like sea foam across his face, assaulting eyes with sand, salt and curls. My dad didn’t use to lounge on the park benches of tourist traveled beaches. No. He preferred unguarded waters and abandoned stretches of sand on which to rest his chronically tan and muscular body. At ninety, his feet no longer walked with their former ease on the unsteady shoreline, so he sat instead, listening to a distant surf with face tilted to the sun. I perched on the sand at his feet, grateful for a few hours together.
Dad opened his eyes when a pigeon landed nearby with a flutter of wings and a soft, “pruuuu, prrruuu.” Dad watched the bird pecking at the sand. Soon more pigeons arrived and their chorus of “pruuuu, pruuuu, cruuuahru” filled the air. One, slightly darker and braver than the rest, hopped on dad’s foot. He leaned forward, palms on knees and squinted hard at the bird, saying, “Janko? Is that you Janko? ...Is that you my old friend?” Receiving no response he offered up a guttural bird song of his own, “Prruuuuuu, cruuuahru.” The pigeon looked up. “Prrrrruuuuu, cruuuahru”, my old man sang. The bird peered in his direction, blinking transparent eyelids, before flying a few yards off. Dad leaned back, closing his own watery eyes and said, “No. I guess not. But you looked like Janko”.
Janko had flown away forty years earlier, after one of his wives left. Maybe it was his fourth who had taken my brothers and I with her? He doesn’t remember anymore and perhaps it doesn’t matter.
With eyes closed Dad said, “Kid, if you’re lucky a bird will love you. It sometimes happens like that.” He opened one eye and conspiratorially glanced at the pigeon, “Right Janko?” Then resumed relaxing his wizened body in the sun, allowing memory to carry him across the tides of time to himself, as a younger man, who cared for homing pigeons to nurse a broken heart.
Dad had spent his life building houses and catching waves. After a long day pitting hammer against nail, he’d slide into a blue-grey California sea to unwind before jostling home in his blue ford truck. He pulled into the driveway and a flock of pigeons cooed from their house on the hill. Dad turned the engine off and lingered, listening to their avian welcome before making his way to the wood-framed, wire coop. His voice was soft and loving as he stroked their feathered necks and backs. The birds nuzzled his hand as he turned the latch to reveal a small flight window. In a feathery rush the blue sky filled with a grey flutter of wings. He hummed, mucking the coop with a bed of clean straw before filling bins with grain and water. The birds invariably returned, unbidden, to eat and roost.
Dad had always been a friend of birds. As a boy he’d discovered a small family of pigeons living beneath a neighbors house and crawled on his belly crooning “cruuuahru, cruuuarah” until the birds came to him one by one. Dad didn’t believe in pets. He’d told me, “Neither man nor beast should be held captive or caged against their will kid, remember that”. And I did. But the pigeons returned to him, day after day, tethered by love and the promise of food.
Back at the beach Dad turned to me, “Did I ever tell you about Janko?” I shook my head no, eager for any story from a man I loved with all my heart but who I knew more as myth than as a man. He closed his eyes, leaned back his head and began, “Janko was one of my homing pigeons. I don’t know why he was different but he was. He liked your old man. He’d eat from my hand and when he sat on my shoulder he’d nuzzle at my neck. I liked Janko too. I’d look for him when I opened the coop and I’d look for him to come home when he was gone. I don’t know why some animals become your friends. I don’t know why some people do. They just do.” Dad looked at me to make sure I was following along. I was. He continued, “I was in a club for people who raised homing pigeons and we’d place money on our birds to see how fast they’d make it back. My pigeons were champion homers.”
“One day I took them all the way up the Oregon coast and waited for them to come home. I had a hundred dollars on the flight. And sure enough Janko was first by a longshot. But he hadn’t come home to roost like expected. I’d spent the day working on a house in Carlsbad and was just putting away my tools when Janko flew down to land on the tailgate of my old truck, cooing soft. He was the first bird back but because he hadn’t come to the coop like the other birds I lost a hundred dollars. No one believed me that a bird could find me instead of his home. That’s just not how things work. Homing pigeons find their coop, not a person. But Janko was different. From then on, no matter where I dropped the pigeons off, Janko would find me.”
Dad smiled, remembering, “For most pigeons and people home is food in your belly and a roof over your head. But that’s not true for people like me and you kid. It wasn’t true for Janko either. Home is where your love is. Remember that. That’s why Janko could find me. Because, for Janko, I was home.” Dad closed his eyes. I laid my head on his knee, listening to the sound of the waves as tears glided down my cheeks. He stroked my hair and for a while I was home.
My dad, Dave Lloyd, died nearly two years ago.
Since then my eldest son moved away for college. My youngest asked to spend more time with his Dad, a pandemic gripped the world and a relationship ended. I found myself a bit unmoored in spite of a house to come home to. It was a strange experience, not unlike Janko circling in ever widening circles, searching for home. I spent the year looking for a place to land. It wasn’t easy. But in time my sense of love and home broadened. Home will always be with those I love, but it also became a vanilla scented pine tree three miles up my favorite trail and a dear friend's recurring texts asking, “How are you today?” Home became a classroom full of children and the three women I teach alongside. Home became phone calls and zooms with loved ones scattered across the world. Home is where your love is and the more you love the more home you have. I remembered Dad.
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