It’s not what you can do for them. It’s what they can do for you.

Today’s “human interest” story on TV is about a New York pigeon named “Pidge” who was adopted by a young lady there and was trained to ride around in a purse. I can relate. I did that too.

My own “purse pigeon” was named Pawchum. It was a dual play on words. The first is “paw chum”. She would ride around on my hand, perfectly content. The second is “Pacem in Terries” which translates to “Peace on Earth’, a papal encyclical issued by Pope John XXIII in 1963. In it, John pontificates on the rights and obligations of people and their states. From John’s lips to God’s ears. No one except God seems to have heard it.

Pawchum was a white dove. Like “Pidge”, she was the luckiest bird alive.

My wife found her. My wife was a chemist who tested various foods for quality. There was a small park near her lab where she would walk occasionally. During one winter, she noticed a white dove that just didn’t seem to “belong” with the rock pigeons that were in the park. Like the unpopular girl in high school, the dove would flock near the other pigeons, but never with them. One day, she was looking out of the third floor window of her lab. It was a cold, snowy day. There was the white dove, huddled in a corner to keep out of the snow, on a three-foot-wide shelf outside the window.

Pawchum was incredibly lucky – in three different ways.

1 – Some of what my wife tested was grain, so there were samples brought in by inspectors around her lab.

2 – The window in her lab could be opened. Most windows in office buildings don’t.

But most importantly …

3 – It was my wife who noticed Pawchum huddled there in the corner.

My wife found a cardboard box, retrieved a handful of grain, and opened the window to scatter a trail across the shelf and into the lab. Pawchum followed the trail of grain through the window and into the box. Later, we decided that Pawchum must have been somebody’s pet.

At the time, I was … well … let’s be honest … psychologically crippled by a multi-year experience at my former job. Back then, a meme invented in the media space was called “going postal”. It referred to an early form of workplace violence. By chance, several instances had taken place in post offices and the media connected them together. People started to think that post offices were some kind of horrible workplace that uniquely drove people to shoot other postal workers. I didn’t work in a post office, but looking back, I could have been one of those people. I was rescued by being kicked out of my job. It’s a lot harder to come to work and shoot people if you don’t come to work anymore.

Anyway, my wife still had a job, so Pawchum became my daily companion. She would ride around the house on my shoulder all day long. Pawchum had a lot in common with “Pidge”, including laying eggs around the house. She was never toilet trained. I just carried tissues with me constantly. But we had a loving relationship. In the morning, my wife and I would have breakfast together and I would read the newspaper. Pawchum would fly in and land right in the middle of the paper, squat down a little bit, spread her wings slightly and look up at me like, “I need a love. Get busy.” If I just moved her to a shelf or something, she would be right back. The only way I could read the paper was to stroke her under her wings for a few minutes. To this day, it sounds unreal, even to me.

I think Pawchum was a critical element of my healing process.

We rescued Pawchum from the elements. But it is far more significant that Pawchum rescued me. I think that people who are cruel to animals are just acting out the cruelty they inflict on themselves.

The most important reason for being kind to our fellow inhabitants of Earth is that it is training for being kind to ourselves.