I bought eggs from a breeder with old stock and raised them with enormous care. I designed training flights that were meant to be challenging, but my birds always got home before I did. I guess it was as close to fathering as I’ve gotten so far and probably will ever get.

I’ve always loved birds. I collected feathers from rare or beautiful species starting in an early life, and I still have most of them. Someday I’ll turn them over to a natural history museum, maybe. Most of those birds are not just rare now but extinct, in some cases for hundreds of years.

I was always captivated by flight and aviation, and I had a child’s worship for the Wright brothers. I was a child in England at the time of their first public flights. Later I realized that Wilbur had been around for centuries and Orville was brand-new, which always makes for the richest partnerships. (Think of Lennon and McCartney. Try to guess who is the old one.)

In this same life I went on an airplane for the first time, a Curtiss JN-4, “Jenny,” just like the biplanes I watched overhead in the First World War. My father took me to a barnstorming show when I was eight and bought me a ticket to ride. I remember climbing up from the airfield, gazing down in a trance as the field became a small patch in a broad quilt and my father a small figure in the crowd. For the first time I swore I could see the curve of the earth. It was one of the moments when I felt the deepest respect for humankind. There have been a few moments like that. And many times I’ve felt the opposite.

My father also took me to the Lambert-St. Louis Flying Field to watch Charles Lindbergh return from Chicago with a cargo of airmail, one of the very first. I took flying lessons later in that life but hadn’t yet gotten certified by the time I died.

When I think of that life, the thing I always picture is sitting among my birds at dusk every night, listening to the sounds of the neighborhood below, fathers coming home from work and kids riding their bikes and the voices on the wireless rising from living-room windows, satisfied to watch the world taking place below me.

I set up regular messenger routes for the pigeons to and from school. I once sent a note to a pretty girl in my English class that way, and another time sent in my history homework when I’d stayed home sick. Most of the times when I should have been paying attention to my lessons I gazed out the window and thought of the skies while my pigeons gathered on the sill.

One time I gave a pigeon named Snappy to my cousin in Milwaukee when the family came visiting at Christmastime. Snappy drove the seven hours in the car to Milwaukee and made her way back to my house in time for New Year’s. I couldn’t believe it when I saw her walking toward me across the front lawn. My cousin was disappointed, but I couldn’t give Snappy away after that.

One night I was feeling lonely and wistful, and I wrote a letter to Sophia and attached it to the carrying capsule on Snappy’s leg. I sent her off expecting to see her back by dinnertime, but she didn’t come. I waited for a week, and another. When a month had passed, I was miserable. I’d sacrificed Snappy to my hopeless errand, and I felt awful about it.

Years went by, and in lonely moments I sometimes imagined Snappy flying over oceans and continents, mountains, forests, and villages. I dreamed her eyes were mine. I pictured her in Kent, in London, flying across the Channel in the effort to deliver her letter. I pictured her perched on a rooftop of Hastonbury Hall, waiting for Sophia to come home. Sometimes I even fantasized that Snappy had found her and succeeded where I had not.

I kept track of time by the length of Snappy’s absence and Sophia’s advancing age. The day I graduated from high school, Snappy had been gone two years and three months, and Sophia was forty years old. On the first day of my residency Snappy had been gone eleven years and one month, and Sophia was just short of forty-nine.

When Snappy had been gone thirteen years and two weeks, and Sophia was fifty-one, I visited my father, who was ill, at our old house. I went up to the roof of the garage and sat by the old loft as the sun went down. I looked down and saw a grizzled pigeon walking up the driveway. With a familiar gesture, she spread her wings and rose to stand beside me on the top of the loft, where there hadn’t been pigeons for years. I saw that she still had my old letter curled up in the capsule attached to her leg. She couldn’t find Sophia, but at least she could find her way home.