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!)