Allison Campbell Jensen

“It’s a sharpie!” the huddle of birders heard and they instantly put their binoculars up and threw their heads back. When their eyes captured the Sharp-shinned hawk, they sighed individually and sequentially, like a chamber orchestra tuning up.

Oh, how I longed to be part of that happy band, so intent on their target, one of the hundreds birds of prey flinging themselves over Hawk Ridge in Duluth that chilly day.

Prior to the trip, when I called the birding trip leader, Kim Eckert, to request permission to join — with a St. Paul Pioneer Press photographer — he asked me on the phone if I was a birder. I paused.

“I like birds,” I said, finally.

Now, after knowing him for 20+ years, I can imagine him suppressing a sigh. I really did not yet know what a “birder” was — but I was about to find out. He allowed me to join the group and with photog Janet Hotstetter, we traipsed along, learning about birds and birders.

Sora calling

I might have met my now long-time friend Fran Howard on that trip north, or maybe it was after (not long after, however). I began signing up for Minnesota Birding Weekends and, by the next summer, I was sequentially standing by wetlands being taunted by Sora who called but never emerged. It would take me years, literally, to get a good look at a Sora, a smallish marsh-loving bird with a high-volume cackle. They laughed at me all that first summer of slowly becoming a birder.

On a trip to the Dakotas, I accumulated life bird after life bird — because I was just starting out — 124 life birds on that trip alone. On some trips, members of the group would come up to Kim with a copy of the Pioneer Press article: “Did you see this?” “Yeah, yeah. I saw it.” His tone was gave off a curmudgeonly vibe — that, however, was his default tone.

Can I be. . . long?

I wasn’t quite sure how to belong. I had recently joined a church after a lifetime of avoiding them (except as places with great art, like the chapel in Zurich or the cathedral in Vienna) and was learning, by watching, ways to behave with groups.

While I don’t necessarily believe that all of Dad’s kids by his first wife, Virginia, were autistic, we certainly were introverted misfits, used to doing things on our own. We typically ate dinner together, in front of the TV, watching the war in Vietnam as presented by Walter Cronkite on CBS News.

My first husband complained, after visiting the Island and immediately being taken to the Clyde Theater to watch a movie: “Your family just likes to sit in the dark togther.” “Ummm, yeah. So?” We didn’t know a lot of other ways to Be.

Meanwhile, my father’s other family was growing. There was one child to start — Tracy — then Stephanie arrived. Trish (Mary on her birth certificate) came next; then Bobby, the boy Dad had been waiting for since his first-born, Richard, came along.

When Bobby came into the family, Trish went silent. For a couple of years. This was long before helicopter parenting — more like, make sure they eat something before you send them out to play all day parenting. No one asked her about her no longer speaking; no one took her to a therapist or psychiatrist. Maybe they figured it was a phase. Hard to know.

Bobby was the golden child: The focus of all Dad’s dreams to finally have a son to replace him. These girls, all his intelligent, sensitive, musically talented (except for me), lovely girls: pish-posh. What the hell were they worth, unless they married?

Was that the issue that Trish sensed right at the start?

I’m not sure when she chose to talk again. Was it after Lori was born? I don’t know. We only saw them during the summer and one wintertime holiday. We were family but not really familiar with one another.

Remembering

After Dad died, seven of us siblings gathered in the Methodist church basement.

We stood in a circle as we remembered Dad. I don’t remember exactly what I said: Did I speak about applying for the Foreign Service, left in the dark that Dad had a fraternity brother in the State Department until after I didn’t proceed past the first in-person interviews? A charitable way to look at that: He wanted me to make it on my own, without pulling in any of his connections: I’m working on that perspective, still.

Finally, an older lady in a wheelchair, hearing our complaints and expressions of pain about a near-absent but all-too-present narcissist father, broke in. “I don’t know who you are talking about! Bob used to come by on Sundays, pick me up, and take me for rides in the country.

“He was very kind and caring.”

Good to know. . . . he has some reservoirs of love for others. Just not his progeny; not all of them; and, at times, none of them.

A different Dad for each child?

Yet every member of a family experiences one’s parents differently: maybe in a big family even more than a small one? One kid’s doting Dad is another child’s taunting monster. So it goes.

In time, each of us found a place to belong or a new family to belong to — at least, I think we all did. Taking a new path off a hard, lonely road can be tough, if that road is very familiar because you’ve walked it solo for so long. Even in a big family.

Over time, with healing, with conversation and, yes, with therapy — Don’t belong transforms into “Don’t be long.” We don’t want to start the party without you.