N West Moss

Word Count 431

I had a friend who was a cop in New York City. I’d known him as a gentle soul who had gone into policing in his 30s, after having been an electrician for years. I called him Sergeant Hummingbird, because he would text me in spring to let me know when the first hummingbird of the season had come to his feeders.

I was in Times Square one busy Saturday night taking out-of-town friends around, when out of the crowd came Sergeant Hummingbird, who threw his arms around me. I hugged him back and could feel his Kevlar vest beneath his uniform. We marveled at having found one another in that sea of humanity.

Slowly, though, policing broke him. It is a tough, dangerous, thankless job in the best of times, but especially so during the polarizing years of Trump’s first term in office, during Covid, during the worldwide massive George Floyd protests, etc. Sgt Hummingbird would tell me that he was spit on daily, that uncountable numbers of people gave him the finger, that the people he assisted hated him, that the bad guys he caught  would get out of jail almost immediately, that his fellow officers were not good guys either, that he was treated with suspicion and pulled into bad behavior by them, that there was no corner in which he could find peace.

Once Trump was in office, I would come across his Facebook feed where he sometimes posted really awful, violent, anti-democratic content about, say, hanging Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In those moments, I would text him and just say, “Hi.” Nothing more. I wanted to remind him that there were human beings he loved on the other side of the aisle, and every time I reached out in this way, he would quietly remove the offending post, or block me maybe. 

My friend retired a few years ago. I haven’t heard from him in many many months. The last I heard he was struggling with depression and had left the country. The last of the hummingbirds have come and gone from my feeders, another summer come and gone, another garden put to bed, and this gentle man who did not choose a gentle career is gone too. It was all too much to bear, I guess. I hope he will be ok in the same way that I hope we will all be ok, hope that we will not be ruined by the rage and division that is thrust upon us daily.

N. West has had her work published in The New York Times, Salon, McSweeney’s, The Saturday Evening Post, and elsewhere. She has published a memoir (Flesh and Blood: Reflections on Infertility, Family, and Creating a Bountiful Life, from Algonquin), a short story collection (The Subway Stops at Bryant Park, from Leapfrog), and a novel called Birdy forthcoming from Little, Brown. She can be reached on Instagram and Facebook.