Childhood, hazy memories seen through the mist of time like a faraway land we visited once, full of wonder, anticipation, promise and magic, governed by faith in a future that held no compromise, only dreams come true and triumphs larger than life. A land we’ll never see again this time around.

Looking back, through the clear lens of so many lessons we didn’t want to learn, it seems to be more of a reverie than reality. The land of innocence. The time when everything was possible because “everything” had yet to begin. The calm before we needed to fly into the storm, when happiness was like breathing, effortless, and we still believed in Santa Claus.

Out of this glittering mirage of the past I hear the echo of children’s laugher, my brother and I, playing in the yard, raising the dust. I see the lined notebook whose pages I filled with my first numbers, open to the half page covered in crooked 4s. Then I picture my left-handed first grade classmate, and his boyish antics dictated by his precocious need to impress the pigtailed girls in blue uniform.

It was out of an expedition through the schoolyard, at recess, that somehow a gray baby pigeon with yellow fluff still sticking through its budding feathers and a thin bold neck, materialized. We brought it to class and hid it in the schoolbag, hoping it won’t make a sound. I don’t recall what we negotiated, whether I threatened or pleaded with my naïve classmate, but hours later I was walking proudly up the hill towards the house, gingerly holding my new treasure in my bag.

The adults were used to the endless stream of stray kittens that made their way to our house via my rescue missions. But this was special! This was before I brought home a raven called Cathy Strutzovich, before most of the other temporary or permanent visitors that populated the menagerie of our childhood. This was the start of an unforgettable friendship.

Thinking it was a boy, I named the pigeon Sile. Sile couldn’t yet feed itself so I would mush bread with water and feed it directly from my mouth, as the actual pigeon parents would. It drank water with a soft gurgle from my mouth too, followed me everywhere, slept under my pillow, learned how to fly from room to room, how to “talk” and play with us, and in no time at all Sile thought I was the biggest bird he’s ever seen, a bird he believed to be its own strange looking, featherless parent. Sile was, by his account and ours, a member of the family.

Removed as we are from other life forms beside mainly our own, we don’t realize how sentient, how emotionally intelligent and aware so many of them are! Sile would teach our small family that lesson, in the most loving and endearing way possible. It’s almost hard to imagine that a bird would want to cuddle, would actually force our hand to respond to its persistent displays of affection, like burrowing underneath the pillows in the morning,purring or cooing, rather, and finding the softest spot to curl up by our neck, when we slept. Maybe he suffered from mistaken identity and believed himself to be a cat. Maybe, being adopted by humans so early, he picked up our best traits and reflected them back to us. I believe it was all him. Sile was just the coolest pigeon cat that ever lived.

A year of this cuddle fest, as life passed blissfully in the village by the hills, and Sile learned how to fly, how to go further and further out over the fields and always come back in the evening as everyone returned home from their daily chores. As with every family member, we started to discuss his future and, inevitably, the potential for a mate. Things just moved much faster for Sile than they did for us, kids, who still had to learn the alphabet and sound our do re mi-s.

One day, my father brought a fat-chested baby pigeon from somewhere. He was more “normal”, more pigeon, less human than Sile but we were thrilled to see them interact and hoped for the 50 – 50 chance that they’d be a match. It was months after that, as baby pigeon number two became a full grown bird, that we realized a gross misunderstanding. Sile, our overly affectionate purring friend, was a girl! “He” had been a girl all along!

She, and I think his name was… Gore (no relation to Al Gore!) or Fane?…or Giugi?….became an item. Yes, folks, happily ever after! No glass slipper or castle but, close enough!

Pigeons date, complete with abundant displays of affection and courtship rituals enough to outshine any Valentine’s day. They mate, share equal (and I mean equal) time on the nest and they have a set of identical twin babies every month. They support, feed and help each other rear the young with such dedication and equality that would make the most evolved and enlightened of couples take notes. If only we stopped thinking we know everything and took notes indeed!

Sile and Gore had their first set of baby pigeons to the delight of the entire family. The surprise we weren’t ready for, one that had the whole village marveling too, was that out of two ordinary gray pigeons we had, through some miracle of creation, two fluffy looking little birds covered in the most beautiful feathers going all the way down to their feet.

Sile continued to come and go as she pleased. She and her new family had a wooden bird house up in a tree in the yard by now. She’d roam the fields and when the threat of a big bird of prey loomed in the sky, she’d dive from wherever she was and land on my mother’s or my grandmother’s shoulder and hide under their headscarf.

There were many generations of pigeons started with one single bird who thought she was a cat.

One day, years later, but still too soon, Sile came home, entered the house as if to say a final good bye, and she died. I can recall the silhouette of the extended wooden bird house hanging in the tree. It was a tree that bloomed with fragrant white flowers in the spring and filled the evening air with its aroma. The tree and the bird house are no longer there. The time itself when all these took place has gone somewhere where we cannot follow.

But I remember you, Sile. And because of you, I love all pigeons.