Birdpeckers

I started reading my old diaries last weekend and got such a kick out of them that when my girl Carrie here stopped by before work I asked her if she’d like to borrow 1980. “Sure!” she said and yesterday she wrote a quick email reporting that she loved reading it and would soon pass it on to her younger sister.I feel good about this: I figure this way if they have any  questions, I’m here to answer them instead of being six feet under with my mouth sewed shut.Anyway it’s all harmless what I wrote, bald fibs in 5^th, 6^th and 7^th Grade, codes and obfuscations in 8^th and 9^th, screeching lunacy in high school and pomposity in  college .It took having kids to bring me back down to earth - that and teaching high school. Because suddenly here were these three blithe spirits – two in the year you see captured  below - who thought I was swell and followed me everywhere. And even when that third one came along ,we still spent hours nesting in the beds, talking, reading, pretending to write things on the ceiling with our toes.The 1980 diary tells the story of little Carrie coming home from  nursery school to say that she had drawn a picture of a goat with just one “poke" on its head.  She smiled a fond mothers smile when I told her this on Monday , for she and her Chris are parents now too.  She told me that their little ones get the words wrong too. In fact each time the younger  one sees that redand black bird who drills away at the trees he says “Look! A birdpecker!”Ah, the  little ones: what did we all do before they came along? No wonder Adam and Eve got bored and made mischief in the Garden!

in the years Before Michael