Truthfully, I don’t think things should really be falling out of the sky.
Call me Chicken-Dang-Little, but I don’t.
Let’s stop right there and talk about the Story of Chicken Little, which is commonly known as The Story of Henny Penny. It is one of the few folk tales that have alternate endings. Quite frankly, the one ending is completely troubling to me. The Fox, Foxy Loxy, tricks all the animals into his lair, and then he eats them. Even Ducky Daddles, and Turkey Lurkey. With Orange Sauce, probably. I can understand the orange sauce with duck, but not turkey.
Anyway. It is a pretty horrific chain of events. And it left its indelible mark on me, I’ll tell you. As I mentioned, to this day, I think that the notion of things falling right out of the sky, is a bad one.
But it happens.
On occasion, some machine that we humans put up there, tumbles. It could be a plane, or a helicopter. Hot air balloons, blimps, drones. Every so often, our human error causes this to unfold. And somebody usually gets hurt. Most of the time, we don’t foresee this. We lack the psychic prowess. It is probably just as well.
Then. Then we have the Skylab Incident of 1979. I remember it like it was yesterday. Skylab was designed as an orbiting workshop. They were going to research all sorts of scientific matters. But it was supposed to go up, and never come down. Well, in 1978, the station’s orbit started to decay rapidly. How an orbit goes to crap, I just don’t know. Nonetheless, it was going to fall. All of us were standing below. It was in the news. Congress demanded answers from NASA — like that would help. And me, and all my friends ran around mocking Chicken Little.
Eventually, it did plummet to earth, and mostly landed in the godforsaken part of Australia. No one was hurt.
But. It was the principle of the thing.
Other things fall from the sky too. Sometimes, huge flocks of birds have fallen from the yonder. A for instance. On the very last day of 2010 in Beebe, Arkansas, of all places, it happened. Some 1,000 blackbirds fell out of the sky, dead. Dropped like bricks. Authorities had their theories of why it happened. They claim that it could have been from high winds. Or something stress-related. Right. The hob-nobs couldn’t figure out anything conclusive. Or they weren’t saying.
There are many instances of some pretty bizarre things that have fallen from the sky: Meat, tadpoles, fish, frozen iguanas, spiders, golf balls, money, bats. Most of the time there is a logical explanation. But that does not negate the horrific creepiness of this condition.
I guess it is just another life lesson. You never know when something’s going to hit you. Be it a mackerel from Cloud Nine, or some bit of news that you hear from a friend. The world is a-spinning round and round, at 1,000 mph, and all of us are spinning with it. I guess at that speed, we never know what we might bump into. From up above.
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“A single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
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“What you don’t know, you don’t miss.”
― Cecelia Ahern, Love, Rosie
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“One is never afraid of the unknown; one is afraid of the known coming to an end.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti
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