The other day, Dot wrote about her job on the Boston Common and the little things that are a crisis to some one. Today, I witnessed the wordplay opposite, a crisis happening to a little thing.

M. met me on the road, and for a bit I rode my scooter along side his jogging self. But the scooter isn’t scooting like it used to scoot. We suspect it’s something with the brake control that cuts out the throttle, as a safety measure.

So instead of scooting and jogging, we walked. As we walked, I saw something up ahead, something tiny fall from the sky to the road. I thought it was a very large moth. It wasn’t.

It was a very tiny bird. Judging by it’s unformed self, I’d say a very young, newly minted bird. Perhaps, it was flapping into flight for its maiden birdhood launch and hadn’t quite gotten the hang of it. Whatever the reason it was fluttering and shivering and occasionally launching itself inches off the ground closer to oncoming traffic. I didn’t want to see a tiny bird speck of blood, feathers and broken, hollow, tiny bones glued to a rolling tiger.

We started herding it with a paper from my bag as an improved shoo-er from the street to the curb. Only problem was the storm drain it fluttered toward and into. We rescued it right into another crisis.

My hero, the inimitable M., grabbed my dirty shirt from my gym bag, lay in the gutter and scooped the little guy out of it’s dungeon. We left it shivering and shaking and evidently trying to calm it’s rapid birdie pulse, maybe to try flight again a bit later, on a fenced and manicured lawn.

My favorite part of this story doesn’t end with M.’s rescue attempt. Nope, it ended for me about 50 yards down the road, where a couple of women with a baby in a carriage asked if we just saved a bird.

Tried to any way. All in a day’s work for a superhero.

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