THE GREAT GADFLY:

Want Some Pizza?

Today on the way to work, I had to stop into the post office to drop off some packages. At my last job, one of the few perks of working in Chicago's Prudential building was that I had access to a post office branch in the building's basement. Now, I have to make do with visiting the bustling, enormous main downtown branch. It's not such a huge inconvenience, really. Just busier, more harried.

Near the entrance, as people scurried to their downtown wherevers as others stood outside smoking and chatting and babbling into cell phones, I noticed something odd wobbling around on the ground near the door.

It was a bird. A really tiny bird. A really tiny pretty bird, with grey wings and a yellow belly. A finch, maybe? I don't know. I'm not good at identifying birds unless they're, like, flamingos or bats or flying squirrels. Even then.

So this little bird, it was hopping back and forth in a tiny little nervous pace - clearly it wasn't able to fly. Maybe it had been someone's pet and it got loose? It was too delicate and pretty to be among the rabble of pidgeons and sparrows. Something had gone horribly awry in this little beast's life, and now here it was, a speck of feathers amidst a sea of concrete.

I wanted to do something for it, but what does a person do to help a bird? I entered the post office and left the little yellow bird's plight to the disempassioned karma of Darwinism - "survival of the fittest" and all that. Sometimes it just bees that way.

After a faster-than-expected trip through the post office queue, I realized I was running late for work and made my way back outside in a rush. Before I exited the post office, however, I looked down and noticed something discarded on the ground in the middle of the facility, near the revolving door exit.

The little bird had made its way inside. It was curled into a little ball, with its tiny black beak buried in its back, looking like some tragic errant baby earmuff.

This time I decided Darwin could go get bent.

I bent down and tried to coax the bird into perching on my finger. I prodded it with the edge of my receipt, and it stirred into a little bit of a flutter, then it hopped on my arm. For a moment, I was shocked that the bird didn't hop on my finger, because that's what they always do in Disney movies. But then, I'm not Snow White and Chicago ain't the Magic Kingdom, and if you're a scared tiny bird, hopping on a big expanse of arm probably makes more sense than a balancing on a piddly little branch of a finger anyway.

The bird was calm as I went through the revolving doors back into the outdoor plaza in front of the post office, where I had first encountered it. I walked it over to a small shrubbery garden, where I figured it could find things to eat or at the very least not get trampled as easily. As I got near the shrubs, the bird began to flap its wings, and before I could lean over to put it in the plants, it had already made an awkward dive into the green.

A man passed me as the bird fluttered off my arm. "That's pretty cool," he said to me.

Then I went to work.