Mother-Eagleman Origins

Mother Eagle’s origin story.

During what might have be an otherwise completely ordinary Friday afternoon in a bustling suburban hub of U.S. commerce, a lone hero feels a familiar twitch in the back pocket containing his wallet (…and slips into a bathroom stall to don his …?) . Long ago, during a time of freshly trickling-down economics and cowboy actor politicians, he found himself trailing forlornly after his mother as she heaved herself through the scrum of fellow mall-goers, whose necks were all craned as if trying to catch the scent of every 50% off sale, every BOGO, every store-discount-plus-coupon pairing possibility within Columbiana Mall. The desperation in their eyes terrified the young boy, who had yet to grasp the gravity of a Christmas morning kneeling before flaccid, empty felt stockings hanging from the hearth, or with only a few hastily-wrapped presents spread under the tree, barely able to cover the quilted wasteland of a tree skirt. He had yet to feel the hollowness provoked by opening another box of socks and Spiderman briefs, or the disgust that rose in his throat as he peeled off the wrapping from still more Nintendo games that had been released more than six months ago, that had been conquered almost as long ago in his best friend’s family room. In fact, he wouldn’t come to feel anything resembling these until his first Christmas away from his family, in a stock broker uncle’s beach house on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. His parents, cozying up at a couple’s resort on a ski vacation in the Swiss Alps, were forced by inclement weather to stay another two days past Christmas and couldn’t join him as expected. Instead of the promised several refrigerator-sized boxes, one lone, sad box appeared on his uncle’s doorstep come Christmas Eve. Its weight and heft foretold its contents – this was the box of practical goods he received every Christmas, the soft, folded, unshakable clothing that he knew by feel was the stuff he wanted to rip open halfway and toss aside first, the woolen argyle sweaters and khaki pants, the fuzzy slippers and staid neckties, the boat shoes. The other boxes had apparently been delayed in transit and wouldn’t arrive until after his parents flew in. As that pathetic Christmas morning dawned, he dripped frustrated tears onto his uncle’s favorite bearskin rug, slowly realizing what only a boy of shining virtue and insight could – that there must be kids all over the world who only received the basics for every Christmas: socks, underwear, hightop Nike Air Jordans, new jeans and polo shirts for school, basically all of the incredibly boring crap that anyone, understandably, could barely stomach looking at any other Christmas. And for now it was all he had from any representative of Santa Claus (though there was that sweet junior-sized crossbow his uncle had given him the night before). The horror he felt in that mall only a few short years earlier coursed through his veins anew, and he realized that those desperate people were all struggling toward the same noble goal – that of trying to offer their wide-eyed and  quivering, deeply-beloved offspring a giant pile of glorious opportunity. To these loving parents, every square inch of visible floor or inch of underfilled stocking represents a glimpse of a darkness so profound as to be third world in nature.

On that very Christmas morning, he quietly swore an oath to himself alone, that no other child should feel as he did that day, that the boxes spread around and lying open before them should never contain only the practical or necessary or boring. He envisioned himself as a creature reborn, arising from a smoking pyre of discarded wrapping paper, unfurling his wings to the East and West and turning his noble beak heavenward. This avian giant would heed the call of forlorn children from Greenwich Village to the Upper East Side, helping their desperate families assemble the requisite objets de capital in honor of America’s noblest, truest tradition of consumption, thus encouraging the flowering of the highest cause – that of the United States’s thriving economy. He would soar from boutique to toy store to outlet mall, offering to help fill the carts of frazzled moms and dads, to push the wheelchairs of injured athletes, and even to clear dirty plates and cups from tables at food courts across the nation.