Gloomy thoughts pervaded my being today. Various parts of me ached, pained and made socially unacceptable noises, it rained again last light, there are still critters in my attic, and I don’t get enough sleep or exercise. All that and Spring is taking its own sweet time in showing up here in my neighborhood.
So, on my way back from dropping Rebecca off at school, I stopped in Forest Park to wander a bit and (of course) get some photos. I pulled over just after the Metro link overpass to get some photos of the Lone Snow Goose. How he wound up hangin’ with the Canadas is anyones guess, but here he (or she) is, in Forest Park, America’s premier (in case I haven’t told you his already) urban park.
Today there were a plethora (do you know what a plethora is, amigo?) of red winged blackbirds in the park between Lafayette bridge and Columbus bridge, and every last one of the darn things was making an awful racket. I spent some time watching them pause for a few seconds and then puff themselves up with spread tail feathers, to make their territorial demands. It was in this brief time between 8 and 9am that the clouds had parted, at least in the east, to let the sun shine through. The puddles, which have become a regular part of my daily pilgrimages in the park, reflect what looks like a different world back to me. I think of Kurt Vonnegut, who in his book Breakfast of Champions has his character Kilgore Trout call mirrors “leaks”, pretending they are actually portals into an alternate universe.
But we artists are already in an alternate universe.
