This sweet memoir is about a tired teacher, athlete, and adventurist, befallen by a mysterious illness as well as a broken heart, who encounters an injured pigeon. The opening paragraph drops you in the middle of all this, and adds the essential word, “rescue”: “My rescue pigeon and I found each other at the very beginning of the pandemic, when we were both dealing with crippling health problems. As time went on, he got better. As time went on, I got worse.”
Buckbee names his pigeon “Two-Step,” and tells us why and how he brought both he and his girlfriend (pigeons are models of faithful coupling) into the house “in the living room in the little nest I helped them make high up on a shelf.”
Prior to meeting Two-Step, Buckbee says, “I had a headache for 422 days straight.” This, in addition to a host of other physical problems. Physicians were, for a long time, of little help to him diagnosing his condition. “What is my stupid body doing to me?” he asks himself, after a series of doctors offer little concrete help. “What is it trying to tell me?” A normally fit, active person, he adds a few paragraphs later: “I swear I’m not seeking attention or sympathy, but it seems as if my body is becoming irrelevant…. I am anchored to my couch, adrift, waiting for my life to come back to me.”
The broken-hearted Buckbee also plays a big role here. An engagement ended when his partner left him. “I miss L,” he writes. “I miss comfort and hope. Doctors say I am depressed. ‘Well, of course I’m depressed,’ I tell them.” There are times when his memories of L do indeed seem to swerve into seeking attention or sympathy — or least into self-pity. Such as when he muses about being on his deathbed, “whether that is this year or the next,” and telling her everything on his mind. Or, perhaps, this is just honesty.
The abnormalities of his nuclear family, his father dying from cancer, and his mother’s slide into dementia, are all here too. The memoir is written in Buckbee’s first person: “One of the biggest gifts my father gave me was staying alive for several years after he got sick. I wish it had been longer, but it was enough time for us to reconcile and become friends again.”
Fitzgerald joins Buckbee to help him tell this story, because Buckbee’s mysterious illness (contracted while in Asia, as it turns out) makes it impossible for him to do so alone. Interestingly, the reader is allowed to witness some of the back-and-forth between the coauthors, “listening in” as Fitzgerald urges him to be as transparent as possible.
As the title suggests, Buckbee credits Two-Step with bringing him back to life. He reflects, “We were friends, companions, family” — during a difficult time.
