When I was a kid a half-dead rat fell from the rafters onto my head. It slid down my face, hit my shoulder and arm then landed on the tile floor at my feet. I was 3. The rat was poisoned, foaming at the mouth, glassy-eyed.
This is one of my earliest memories.
I ran through our Hollywood Hills Spanish mansion to find my Mom and Nanny and I recall yelling, “A half-dead rat fell on my head!”
“No,” they said. They assumed my imagination was at work, and didn’t want to get up and schlep across the unnecessarily grand house to verify the claim.
So I ran back to where the rat lay to make sure I wasn’t wrong, and there it was in a pool of gurlging poison, still twitching. I ran back to the grownups and insisted they come with me.
I can still feel the slap of the rat’s tail on my face as it fell.
Anyway.
1So, my Dad sold that house in a fire sale during a downturn in the economy back in the early 1990s and has been pissed off about not being rich enough ever since.
That rat emergency is part of why I decided back when we still lived in that house that when I grew up and had a family, we would live in a small house where we could hear each other and be near each other and not have to run so far for help when rats fell on our faces.
Flash forward to now. Yesterday I was avoiding the news cycle because my Dad has gone viral for sharing his heinous opinions about Blackface. I don’t speak to him, and my rule is also not to write about him (usually), or really discuss him at all if I can avoid it, but life is very surreal when the person who takes up so much psychic space in your brain despite having zero time for you in real life is showing up in your Apple News feed again saying things you’ve cried and begged and yelled at him to please not believe, but have also long ago given up because boomers gonna boom. It’s also very stifling to feel like you shouldn’t write or talk honestly about your famous father who everyone is always asking you about. “Aw your Dad must be such a proud Grandpa,” people say to me all the time, not realizing that my Dad has only met his youngest grandson twice. Anyway. Anyway. This is not new for me. After my parents split up and I lived in Idaho and rarely saw or spoke to my dad, I used to get my daily dose of parenting from hearing his voiceovers on Honda commercials. I learned about both of his subsequent marriages after my Mom by reading about them in the news. It is funny in that way that hurts so much you can’t breathe so you laugh breathlessly instead.
So to distract, I took my youngest son for a walk around the neighborhood. We left from our small home, where my kids share a room and we all share a bathroom and I can hear them chattering through the wall into the night. My husband and older son were inside playing video games together, and the little one and I set off down the hill. He was on his green scooter. We went around the former race track that is now the main street in our neighborhood and admired the birds. Hawks, doves, ravens, little blue birds and hummingbirds, too. I tried not to think about anything other than my precious child and his adorable mullet and the fact that the sun was out and that this life we have built, my life’s love and I, over 20 years of our relationship, is so different from the childhood I had, and in so many ways is exactly the life I dreamed of living. I breathed in and out a lot.
Then we spotted the biggest hawk we’ve ever seen up close. She was majestic!!!!! Perched atop a lamppost like the queen of the neighborhood.
Above you can see a video I took of her.
At first we thought she was hunting, but then we realized she had actually carried her dinner up onto the street lamp and was using it like a dinner plate! It was so cool that we stopped the two people seen at the end of the video running down the hill to show them the hawk and discuss her majesty with them. We agreed that we felt slightly sad for the gopher (technically a vole, I believe) that she had killed and was consuming in front of us, but on the other hand, those gophers are the bane of the neighborhood gardeners and we nodded our heads in agreement that we were grateful to the hawks and ravens for culling their numbers. The neighbors ran on. Nature took its course.
My son put his little helmet back on his head by himself and started off for home.
And then it happened. In slow motion. First I watched my son’s adorable little legs pump his scooter. He is getting the hang of it. Then I looked back up at the bird. She was dangling a kind of worm-looking thing in her mouth, and I thought, “Ew, gross. I hope he doesn’t see that.” I scanned my eyes down toward my son and saw that he was scootering JUST BENEATH the bird. Again I thought, “Uh oh, that bird won’t drop that worm on my baby, right?”
Wrong.
Wrong wrong very wrong.
It wasn’t a worm. And she did drop it. Right as he passed under her. I watched as the long entrails of the gopher — filled with excrement and attached to a long vein filled with blood leading to what I assume was the heart — PLOPPED on my son’s head. ON HIS HEAD. GOPHER GUTS ON HIS HEAD.
His helmet has little perforated holes on the top, and the guts oozed down into them.
I ran to him as he squealed in shock calling, “Mommy, mommy!” An incantation. To my son, “Mommy” is a magic word that cures all ills. “Mommy,” he wailed.
The stomach of the gopher sat glopped onto my son’s tiny little perfect hand, glistening in the sunlight. The rodent’s intestines were dripping down his FACE. I unlatched his helmet to reveal his adorable hair matted with blood.
I picked the guts off my baby. I took the bottom of my white tank top and wiped the blood and gunk off his face. I took his helmet and scooter and picked him up like a football and carried him up the hill, whistling the family whistle that my Mom taught me as loudly as I could in the hopes that my husband and older son would hear and come out to help us.
He was crying, but my son had no idea really what had happened. He just knew it was gross. Lately he’s been really worried about germs and honestly all I could think was “don’t panic and make him worried that germs literally fall from the sky at all times,” so I was working hard to keep it cool.
Here are some things I said to make him feel better. And to make myself feel better.
“Wow honey oh my god are you ok my poor baby, wow she was giving you a present I guess, she wanted to share her dinner with you, you poor darling, my god that was awful, but also really cool right? what are the chances? that must be good luck. it’s good luck when a bird poops on you, so it must be even extra special good luck when she gives you her food! She knew you were a Hawk, too just like her, so she chose you!”
You see, we’ve been trying to come up with a new last name for our nuclear family for a few years. I didn’t take my husband’s name when we got married, and the boys have my last name as a middle name, which is confusing and means that none of us really has the same name. Last year we landed on Hawk. We call ourselves the Hawks. It’s like a superhero alter ego that we use when playing make believe, and sometimes I sign my paintings Emily Hawk just to see what it feels like to not be a Dreyfuss.
“It knew I was a hawk too!” he repeated with delight.
My husband came rushing out of our little house when he heard the whistle and he and our older son helped me clean the little one up. Immediately they also helped frame what was clearly a disgusting potentially traumatizing experience as something really cool and special.
“The hawk chose you! Because it could see how much of a hawk you are!” my husband said.
“I wish a hawk had chosen me!” our older son said, knowingly.
An hour or so later we went to a birthday party for the little one’s best friend and though I was traumatized and told all the parents about the gross gopher guts, my son was totally over it and just laughed. It’s already just a funny story.
Watching him go down the slide with the other 4 year olds, a song from when I was a kid popped into my head. I used to sing it meanly to the boy I had a crush on during first grade recess. “Jonathan reminds me of great big globs of greasy grimy gopher guts, hairy hairy pigs feet, marinated monkey meat!” God, I’m sorry Jonathan. I sang the song once under my breath and then willed myself to be quiet.
I don’t have to bring my childhood terrors to him. I don’t have to bring his grandfather’s sorrows to him, either. He doesn’t have to remember the thwack of the gopher guts on his face. Life is magic, and he can focus on that. Hell, so could I.
[NOTE TO FUTURE SELF, BITCH YOU COULD DELETE THIS GRAF AND THE ESSAY WORKS WTF. DOES PRIVACY MEAN NOTHING TO YOU? LOL. REMINDER FROM CURRENT SELF: PRIVACY CAN BE A BURDEN TOO.]
The One About the Hawk Dropping Bloody Gopher Guts on My Son's Face