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You can read it free or to it. At first the story reminded me of the children in those medical documentaries where the child has a birth defect and doctors in the US, UK or Australia fly them over from India to fix them. Invariably these children are from very poor and backward villages and the child, with six limbs, an extra head or other appalling defect is worshipped as a god. People come to give them offerings and beg for miracles. Their minds cannot conceive of anything out of the ordinary that isn't to do with religion. And so it is with these poor Colombian folk on finding an old man with wings in their chicken coop.

They don't understand him and he makes no effort to involve himself with them, just choosing to live quietly until spring, the time of renewal, when his feathers will grow again and he can fly and be free once more.

Meanwhile his 'keepers' do whatever the Indians do too, they charge for viewings and grow rich on the proceeds. So whether or not the miracles of the teeth, the sunflowers and - my favourite - 'almost winning the lottery' are true or not, their rags to riches story certainly is.

People find it hard to accept that which is different from them, they invent reasons, they praise them, worship them, ridicule them, isolate and exclude them, but they just can't accept them and go about their daily business. You don't need wings or a deformity, you just need to be different enough that the tribe will say you are 'other'.

That's what happens with race, with immigrants, with people of different religions, even those that move to a neighbourhood that is distinctly unlike their own background. Our common humanity is ignored for the sake of tribal-bonding and the feelings of superiority it gives its members.
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Meaning? I have been thinking on the meaning of the story and think I have a clue. The peasants think he is a foreigner from far off lands and he sings himself sea shanties in Norwegian. He is an angel, or at least a being from another sphere or dimension, maybe he was one of the original ones maybe even a Magrethean like who got left behind before the mice settled on using humans. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Just joking.