Dad, Why am I So Ugly?

"Dad," Orange Pip asked. "Why am I so ugly?"

The California Condor, whose name was Gym, burped. He had indigestion. He was so gassy, his belly so hot, he imagined his burp would come out as a stream of fire and people would think he was a fire-breathing dragon. It must be the carcass, the one he had devoured three hours ago. Which, at the moment, was burning a hole in his stomach. Gym wished he could give the food in his belly a heave-ho, but first, he needed to respond to Orange Pip, his son.

"Ugly?" he said. "No, Orange Pip. Not ugly. In the eyes of the beholder and all that stuff."

"We are!" Orange Pip said. "Look at me. My pink-orange head is wrinkled like an old man's. It's nestled in black spiky feathers, as though it's grown out of a bowl of thorns. My head isn't even a pretty orange, but tilting toward chicken fat yellow and my face is smudged with soot. My neck is bulbous like a balloon, and other than a smattering of black hair around the nose, my head's bald. It isn't smooth or shiny, but an unhappy sort of hairlessness, as though stress made me pluck out my own hair. How is this an attractive look? Tell me?"

"There's no need to be poetic about your looks," Gym said, as he flared his wings that were powerful and wide and ten and half feet across. "Or lack thereof. Listen to me, Orange Pip. I have to tell you this: We roamed the Earth tens of thousands of years ago. We are as old as mastodons and sloths, but mastodons and sloths did not live to the modern era. We did."

"So what?" Orange Pip said, impressed, but still upset. "We're still ugly."

"We serve a purpose. We do not kill, but eat carcasses of deer, cow, and sheep. We gobble their insides, we burrow our heads and slurp up their innards. If we did not, there would be dead creatures rotting all over the place. We are scavengers, not predators."

"Who cares if we're predators or scavengers?" Orange Pip said, making a note of what Gym was telling him. He had never heard Gym speak with such clarity and force. "We're still ugly."

“I CARE!” Gym said, proudly. His voice bounced off rocks, echoed in the canyon. "Reflect on who we are and what we do, not how we LOOK, Pip. We do not have a tuft on the top of our head. We're not cute. But imagine the mess our heads would be in, if we had hair? Baldness keeps us CLEAN. I'm PROUD of who we are. Of how we look. Excuse me. I have to puke."

Gym waddled off, making retching noises.

Orange Pip sighed. His Dad was smart and made sense. He could tell his Dad anything at all, and no matter how sick, his Dad listened. He responded. He talked very well. He was puking very well too, at the moment. Looking pretty ugly too. Orange Pip smiled, then laughed. No, I stand corrected. Not ugly. He loved his Dad and his Dad was special. He was also right.

Carolina parakeets were gorgeous, but they were extinct. Dodos weren't bad to look at, but they were extinct. California Condors were distinctive. They had character. "We're NOT for the shallow," Orange Pip declared, suddenly. "Our looks grow on people with imagination. Now I'm off. Got to bring home a fresh carcass for Dad. That will make me feel good."