Birds, Gators, And Dirty Binoculars

My cousin J.W. and I went to the park the other day to gawk at birds and I used his extra binoculars. I was a little stunned to see how clear they were, though my cousin remarked that he couldn’t remember the last time he’d cleaned them. Uh…okay. I made a mental note.

Well, we saw some pretty good birds that afternoon for a couple of lazy guys not working very hard at it. Around the large pond there we saw a yellow-crowned night heron that was just dead gorgeous, a colorful mallard, some starlings with their bright yellow beaks, a noisy red-bellied woodpecker high in the trees, a pair of eastern bluebirds, of which the VERY BLUE male simply would not hold still for J.W.’s digital camera, which nearly gave my cousin a brain hemorrhage. We take our birding and other hobbies rather seriously, you see.

Oh, and an alligator—now, that’s NOT a bird name of any kind--sunning itself on a log, its mouth wide open, all the time we were there. I’m not sure if the mouth was open for ventilation or if it was waiting for Mr. Extra-stupid Dinner to just walk right in. I’m sure he knew why he was doing it and I left him to it. As far as I knew he never moved while we were there, but when my cousin put the photos on the computer screen at his house, I saw that Mr. Bigmouth had in fact closed it at some point. Hmm, glad he was so far away, because I apparently forgot to keep watching him! But, anyway, you can see the oddest things in a city park around here.

So, when I got home I cleaned the lenses on my binoculars. Lord, I could see again! My face turned red to realize that I had failed for so long to clean mine! My only excuse is that I used to clean them so often that I got tired that there never seemed to be any improvement. It didn’t seem very intelligent to just keep at it. I guess I even worried that it wasn’t good for the glass to be cleaned too often. I have the weirdest thoughts. But it’s not as if I get fingerprints or peanut butter smears on them--I’m very careful! It’s only the dirt film of the universe, the very air we breathe that gets on there, slowly but surely, speck by speck, day by day. So it turns out that I’ve now gone in the opposite direction and hardly ever remember to clean them. This also is Not Intelligent.

Okay, but this is a new day (all over again). From now on, I’m back to full Technicolor. No blur, no fog, no wondering why there’s an indistinct soap film over my eyes. Just red, white, and blue birds—clean, clear, true! Cue the music! Somebody pull out a flag and wave it for me, I’m busy cleaning my binoculars.

Come on, night herons, I’m ready for you this time! Prance on out here, shake a tail feather, do a little Sneaking-Up-On-Dinner dance! Gobble that crawfish, it’s all yours. Brother, no one else here is going to eat a live one! Blech! I’ll be watching, though, stalking you as cautiously as you stalk the tasty wigglies in the water...

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I almost forgot to say that the woman I talked about at the Blindfold Blog said yesterday that today would indeed be her last entry in the blog.

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THE POINT

It started a long time ago:
What went for me
Came down to this:

That all that moved
Moved well in time,
And if it moved was done in time.

“A champion of the words” is what they said.
“A man who moves and suffers
And lives and dies

Upon the point of words
As if they were a sword—
But what’s the point of that?”


Ronald C. Southern
Current draft: 02/27/03

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Let’s not get too cocky, but it’s pretty much a fact, that sorry old Coming Attraction is coming Tomorrow… “The 17 Best-Known Root Causes of Bad Driving“

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THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.” -- Napoleon Bonaparte

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