Bromidic Words of Power

“Have a safe trip,” he texted to his wife. He’d gotten up early to be at work by 5:30 that Saturday morning. His wife and children left the house sometime later, on a short trip to Minnesota to visit family. He would have gone, but work has its own demands that sometimes take precedence over family and, he sighed, it pays the mortgage and the college tuition.

“Have a safe trip.” Was he instructing her? “Have a safe trip.” Was he giving her polite, but needless advice? Polite at best; condescending at worst. She would, of course, drive safely. She didn’t take risks, especially with the kids in the car. She didn’t speed; she maintained a safe distance between her and the other vehicles on the road. But so much depended on things outside of her control: weather, road conditions, other drivers, even animals… How would his instruction (?) advice (?) cover all of that?

Or was it perhaps something else? Could it be an ancient, forgotten, dormant – but still potent – magic? Could it be that by saying the words, “have a safe trip,” he was unconsciously attempting to influence reality. Those words, as common and ordinary as they were, banal and bromidic, were words of power. Words, spoken aloud, have an essential ability to influence the course of reality, to affect the universe.

He remembered his mother scolding him when he was a boy for chanting, “fall, fall, fall” as his younger brother rode his bicycle without training wheels for the first time. “Don’t say things like that,” she said. “It might happen.” She believed that words had power, and she was afraid of that power. She feared for the safety of her boys.

Work went quickly, as quickly as work will go on a Saturday. And second shift came in early, so he was home a couple of hours earlier than he had expected. He showered and changed, went out for lunch and a beer, and bought some groceries. It was raining. It was warm enough for rain on that late December mid afternoon. But it wasn’t the rain that held his attention as he loaded the groceries into the back of his car, nor the relative warmth. It was the birds that held his gaze. Perched on the telephone wires and lamp posts he saw three, no four different birds.

He saw a silver dove – like a spontaneous utterance, like a word in the now, softly spoken. He saw a small white owl – a symbol of holiness and sober prophets. He saw a golden eagle – and thought of long range forecasts and predictions. He saw that it was something more than just the weather report for next weekend, beyond predictions of who would win the next presidential election; the eagle was more than all of these. And he saw a bird that he could not identify. If he could have identified it, he would have been surprised for Stormy Petrels are not found in central Iowa in December, even warm Decembers like this one.

He put the last of the groceries in the car and looked again at the birds, but now they were ravens. All of them. Black winged ravens and crows, perched on top of the car, on the roof of the grocery store, on the telephone wires, on the lampposts, in the street. He drove home, and saw ravens and crows on his front stoop. There may have been, he wasn’t sure, something to be seen in all those birds. Could those strange loops and swirls of flocking birds have been evidence of massive government malfeasance? 

He didn’t think so, but…