careening through a cloud of strings there at the start of "just friends," charlie parker comes flying on casual arpeggios of breath.

a wild turkey struts like a frantic egyptian down there on our asphalt drive and out across the lawn between here and the school... big black and gray gobbler, red at the throat... on a mission.... finally vanishes into our nearest neighbor's backyard. it could be wild... had no necklace, no license plates.

out of the wind yesterday, away from the snow, some discombobulated birdie perched on the narrowest ledge of putty at the classroom window and tucked its head under a wing. spring can be hard here in lake county.

down at mom's the lake has a loon and a heron. it has a mythical bald eagle and a mess of tiny scaups. it has pugnacious ducks and big-butt geese that climb the hill to snuffle the grass around the feeder for fallen seed. and up by the house there are hummingbirds (in season) and finches, bluejays, tits, woodpeckers, grackles, doves, and the sparrows of dreams. and more.

tonight we had chicken cacciatore over rigatoni with artichoke hearts and mushrooms, but i passed on the chicken. it would have been too much.

i approve of the crows. i like them. i call them "beautiful" and people think i'm crazy. i like their plutonian shimmer. the cat would be a crow if she were a bird.

"that's the cat's tree," i told the sophomores when they noticed that the blinds were wide open and we could see the whole world out there. "the cat is in charge of all the birds in that tree." she sits at the foot of my bed and watches the birds. she indexes them by feistiness (she likes the jumpy small ones best) and (in imagination) by crunch and by taste. she approves of the tunes those flashy cardinals make. she doesn't care for the squirrels at all.

how much turkey should a human eat? in class today i noted that once, some centuries ago, a group of europeans believed that animals were only machines made of meat. these europeans had no qualms about raising and killing and eating animals because they had no souls. the other night i ate turkey translated into some kind of sausage, smothered in onions and mustard. is this not just a tiny bit perverse?

down by the garage on a snowy night last week, a small deer nosed through the evergreen where the tiny birds sleep and squabble.

there are no birds in bethlehem tonight.

A turkey is more occult and awful than all the angels and archangels. In so far as God has partly revealed to us an angelic world, he has partly told us what an angel means. But God has never told us what a turkey means. And if you go and stare at a live turkey for an hour or two, you will find by the end of it that the enigma has rather increased than diminished.

G. K. Chesterton