Giving you the bird

There is a lot to love about the internet. I sort of remember life without it, but I can’t imagine how we all functioned as we did. The all of it. Getting a quick message to someone, streaming TV, going to the bank, writing letters, shopping, finding out how many hours the mongoose sleeps each day.

Whatever did we do?

Some things are large. Super duper large. Like it or not, Amazon has become Amazonian. Yesterday, I needed a better way to charge my Apple pencil. I sleuthed a minute on Amazon, and this morning, I placed my brand new Apple Pencil Charger on my nightstand. Magic.

Those people who live in big cities get their Amazon drops in a couple of hours. Short on milk? Need a car part? Have an itch? If you live in Boston, all three questions can be answered, right on your doorstep, in 120 minutes. Boom.

Whatever did we do?

At Christmas time, I found my Grinch Wall Clock. If that isn’t a beautiful gift of the Universe, I do not know what is. Ah, but my better half mentioned the other day that the Green Grinch Head doesn’t really match our kitchen towels. I am typically slow on the uptake, but I understood this one.

Have no fear. Ebay is here. Truthfully, I had no premeditations of buying a wall clock that morning. That is often the way of the Internet. Things happen to you online, which you had no intentions or prior calculations of transpiring. One minute, you will be scouring the interweb for the perfect Pineapple Upside-down Cake, and three hours later, you will know the Capital of Arkansas, how much a platypus weighs, and the total number of deaths occurring on Mount Kilimanjaro each year. Honest to goodness, it unfurls in the most curious directions.

So yes. Back to the wall clock. I received an email update, letting me know of items which had recently been listed on Ebay by some of my past sellers. There was a neat little model car, some vintage photographs, an old Greek coin, and the jewel of a lifetime. A wall clock. But not any old wall clock. No. This one has little pictures of birds on every hour. A Nuthatch, Wren, Chickadee, Cardinal, and on and on. And when that hour goes straight up, the clock emits the “Bird-of-the-Hour” chirp. So, say, at five o’clock, we hear the song of the Tufted Titmouse.

It makes our dogs absolutely crazy. But aside from that caveat, how dang lucky can we get?

A bird wall clock. Yeah. So while writing this, I found out that in 1914, Martha, the last living Passenger Pigeon, died. That made me very sad. I wish I could hear her song now. Contrary to popular belief, you cannot find “anything” on the internet. This world wide web.  Because some things of this world are gone forever. Like Martha’s Song.

But yet. Here we are, connecting through the wires and the waves, on the digital Universe. It can be a great advantage if we steer the straight and narrow. Or a curse, if we do not watch our way.

Such is life, I suppose. The everything. The ups and downs, the goods and bads. The unknown “thing” at every turn. I am thankful for the way it is, exactly as it is. Bird Call Wall clocks, the fact that 8,000 Americans are injured by musical instruments each year, and the realization that bananas are curved because they grow toward the sun. Yes.  The best fact of the day.

So, maybe at our next turn, we should be like a banana, and just grow toward the sun.

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“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
― C.G. Jung

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“At the center of your being
you have the answer;
you know who you are
and you know what you want.”
― Lao Tzu

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“For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.”
― Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics

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