POT POUR EEE

Blog number 422 **** 24 September, 2010

I was born on a farm in northern Iowa, moved to Des Moines when I was four, spent the summers on my grandparent's farm, lived there again from age twelve to fifteen, when we moved to Emmetsburg, Iowa - a small town about twelve miles from our old farm.

My Grandmother raised a flock of chickens. The money she got from selling the eggs was hers. One of the things she fed her chickens was skim milk. One of my jobs was to pour the milk into their trough, so I was often able to watch chickens drink. They loved milk.

I was also able to watch various birds drink from standing water after a rain. I grew up seeing birds drink. And yet, only today, reading a book, I learned that birds cannot swallow and that's why they have to tip their heads up when they drink, so that the fluid will run down their throats.

I don't know how that tidbit affects you, but for me, I was kind of stunned. It never occurred to me to wonder why birds drank like that. In retrospect, I should have asked someone the first time I saw it. And surely I should have wondered by the time I was a teenager. I really thought they were swallowing. Tilting their head back and swallowing. But why the head tilting? That should have been a clue that something was amiss.

The only excuse I can think of for accepting what now appears odd, was that it was so common that I never thought it odd, and therefore never wondered about it. If my first view of a bird drinking had been when I was middle aged, I think I would have wondered about it. Maybe not.
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We went to Mimi's today and a Bruce Springsteen song was playing. When we first started going to Mimi's, they played old thirties and forties songs - Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, swing bands, etc. I hate that stuff. I hated it when I was a teenager and that was our music.

So Mimi's threw out old Blue Eyes and brought in "The Boss." Thank you, Mimi's! Thank you, thank you, thank you.

There WAS good music back then in the old days. Good melody, and sometimes even good lyrics. I often fantasize, when I happen to hear one of those old songs, that if I had a band, I would play some of them - with a rock arrangement, of course. "Peg O My Heart," "Whispering," Damn, there are a lot more, but my mind is drawing a blank.
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Overheard in the dentist waiting room yesterday;

Three year old girl, holding a picture in a magazine up for her mother to see, "mom, is this nasty?"

"What is it?"

Little girl, "I don't know."