Don't Let the Turkeys Keep You Down

Once upon a time, during a windstorm, an eagle’s egg was dislodged from a nest, tumbled down a steep hill, miraculously survived, and landed in the nest of a hen turkey. The little eaglet hatched when the little turkeys hatched, so it stands to reason that he assumed he too was a turkey.

Olson, R.J. (2017)

As he grew older, however, the eaglet would sometimes look up, see birds swooping across the sky, and think, "I wish I could soar among the clouds like them. I bet the earth is so huge and so beautiful when you look down on it from above.”

Then one day, the eaglet shared his longing with his little turkey siblings. "I want to fly,” he said. He pointed upward at a passing flock of geese, "Like them. See how they move their wings up and down and move through the air?"

His siblings stared at him, mouths agape, then burst into riotous laughter. "You silly, foolish dodo," one said as he wiped his eyes with a wing. "Everybody knows that we turkeys can't fly."

So from that day forward, the eaglet kept his longing to himself. Yet with each day that passed, his hunger to fly grew stronger and stronger still. He would stare up at the vast blue heavens and an ache would settle around his heart. "Oh," he thought, "how I yearn to spread my wings and fly. Why do I have to be earthbound?"

Time passed, and the little eaglet grew larger, much larger in fact than his siblings; and one day, he stood looking up at the sky and suddenly couldn’t stand it any longer. "I want to fly!" he shouted. And with that, he took off running across the field, flapping his wings, and chanting, "I'm going to fly! I’m going to fly! I’m going to fly!"

His turkey siblings stopped pecking around on the ground to watch their "foolish" brother running across the field and flapping his wings like an idiot.

Smith, P. (2017)

"Come back here," one of them yelled. "You dummy, don't you know turkeys can't fly?"

"Yeah," squawked another one, "turkeys can't fly, and that means you can’t fly!"

But the eagle kept running and flapping his wings. And, suddenly, he felt his feet leaving the ground, so he flapped even harder and, as he did, he began to rise higher and higher and higher still, until he was no longer earthbound but like the birds he had so envied—flying above the trees, pastures, and streams.

His turkey siblings shouted in unison, "Get back down here where you belong. You're one of us, you turkey, and everyone knows turkeys can't fly!"

The eagle ignored their jeering, flapping his wings some more, as he felt himself being lifted upward on the currents of the wind. He spread his wings and rose yet higher and higher, and the next thing he knew, he was soaring so far above the earth that his siblings on the ground were but tiny little dots, really no more than grains of sand. The eagle looked around at the unending sky and then down at the tapestry of green fields and blue, winding streams beneath him, and as he did, he thought how he’d been right: the earth was so much larger and, oh, so very beautiful when you saw it from the heavens. The turkeys didn't know what they were missing.

And the moral of the story is: Don’t let the turkeys keep you down.

Google Images (2015)