Our household often contained a bird.  When Kevin was about 15, he acquired a cockatiel that stayed with us until Kevin joined the Navy.  One of my strongest memories of Kevin includes Bruno.  His mother offered to take Bruno when Kevin joined the Navy, and although she no longer has Bruno, I believe she gave him to a friend and Bruno is still alive somewhere.  But I'm ahead of myself.

One of Kevin's friends had a pigeon coop with four adult birds.  The first I heard of them was when this friend's family was going to move from the neighborhood and was unable to move the birds to their new home.  Kevin asked if we could take the birds and since we had plenty of room in the back yard, we said "OK".  In the following months we all got a lot of enjoyment from these birds.  They layed eggs which soon hatched and grew to be healthy birds.  Soon, several generations had been born and we had about 20 birds in our coop. 

These birds followed a daily ritual - they would fly off around sunrise and return home in the late afternoon.  One Saturday afternoon while they were off doing whatever pigeons do during the day, I decided their cage needed a good cleaning.  There were no eggs or babies at the time so Kevin and I proceeded to shovel out all their droppings and polished things off by hosing down the coop.  Their cages sparkled.  That afternoon when the birds came home, they landed on some power lines instead of going to their coop.  Somehow, they no longer recognized it as their home.  They stayed on the power line until it was dark and never did enter the coop.  That was the last we ever saw of any of them.  None of them ever returned.  I guess we somehow destroyed their home by hosing it clean.

We were all broken hearted at the loss of these birds and Kevin found out that Dad didn't always know everything.