Window on the Morning

I sure do like it here. Who thinks up all this entertainment for us?Four hours ago the world was indigo-blue when I shot up in the bed and let out a yelp. I had dreamed a bird flew at my face, then got stuck in my hair, which Old Dave calls ‘the Net’ because all kinds of things get stuck there.He heard me yelp, dealing as he was with Chapter 20,569 in Dave’s Own Book of Insomnia. He says he just opened one eye, thought “Good ol’ TT” and went back to sleep.So four hours ago we had Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds" around here and now in a few minutes the sun is going to be up and spreading its unconditional love all over the place, even on the messy lawns and sidewalks ankle-deep in leaves with last night’s winds.People are glad to wake up, that’s what I think, however much they moan about having to crawl out from under those covers.We all have our rituals, the bathing, the drinking something hot, the stretching... Maybe we fire up the television and let the paid cheer of the morning news team wash over us. “They care!” we’re meant to think. "They want us to start the day informed of the latest roll-over, low pressure system, house fire!" It’s not exactly the way our mothers used to wake us but it will do.So here it is Monday of the week of heavy obligation I whined about yesterday, only rather than feeling burdened I feel content. Content and even happy to be stitched so tightly into the fabric of my community.Just now our neighbor inched up out of his driveway just like always. The newspaper whumped down onto our sidewalk at the usual time too. All over the land teachers are walking down the still-empty corridors toward their classrooms, and the lines at the drive-thrus are eight and ten deep with the eat-on-the-run types.When I get up, I make coffee and sit right down here for an hour – and now I'm remembering I told a favored friend I would find her some footage of a ginkgo tree and sure enough here is a YouTube clip of one in Anduze, France.I watched it three times before I noticed what people left as comments underneath it. Two years ago somebody wrote “That’s a beauty!!!!” Then eight months ago another person said “Ginkgo the best!” Lastly a year ago, somebody else again viewed the same footage and wrote “my cats staring at me and I’m worried cos i havent fed him, mmmmm nice tree.”I like that last one ungrammatical as it is, the way the person registers obligation and beauty. Her cat and this lovely old tree having its hair combed by the wind. The near and the far. It shows just exactly how we live.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyH6S1IcZJI&feature=related]

Look Up, Dummy

This is  me with my new phone.  And yes that's my old phone in pieces on the floor beside me. (I bit it; I was mad.)I like this picture because it reminds me  how all of us are in this head-bent position all the time. We have so many screens in our lives, so many little gadgets we're poking and peering down at, while all this time the real excitement is happening above our heads.I mean the birds. The birds are going by thick and fast now. I feel like I’m on the tarmac at the airport almost, the big commercial birds and the little private birds, all zooming past. At 6 o'clock this  morning the sky was thick with them the way it used to be thick with passenger pigeons in America’s early days when they literally darkened the skies so numerous were they - until those pasty-faced Europeans arrived in the 1600s that is. They shot and ate them by the hundreds of thousands; then shot them and fed them to the pigs; then just plain shot them idly and for sport the way they later shot the buffalo, and in such numbers that by the year 1900 they were all but gone and by 1914 the very last one died in the Cincinnati Zoo. Sad.No birds are dying up there now though. You look up into the clean late-March skies and find yourself rooting for them, just the way you secretly did the first time you saw Alfred Hitchcock's famous movie.They're ba-a-a-a-ck!  Go to the window right now and look up. (And for heaven's sake turn off the phone!)