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Our friend the robin

Tuesday 5/28/24

Our friend the robin is the bird that arises the earliest. Depending upon where you live. If you're reading this near a South American rain forest, that would be a different bird for you. But here it's the robin. In many American places it's the robin. If you're up early, the beautiful song you hear is that of Mr. Redbreast.


I've always liked robins. The birds of the northeast are all my favorite birds. Robins, blue jays, cardinals, chickadees, gold finches. And the house sparrow, which was not a bird I saw very often in the more rural areas in which I grew up, despite how ubiquitous they are not so far away here in Boston.


Robins spend what has always struck me as an amusing amount of time on the ground for a bird. It's like they're defiant. "You think I can't walk across a lawn just because I can fly?" Then hop hop hop, across the lawn they go.


If it is true that the early bird gets the worm--and I think it is--then the robin would be atop the leader board. I'll see many pretend writers stay up to all hours, get up late in the morning, like this is how it works if you're so creative, etc.


It's not how it works at all. Getting up and doing it is how it works. Don't let anyone fool you, because that's all they're attempting to do, in addition to fooling themselves.


The robin will start to sing shortly after three o'clock. We're told that three o'clock is this bad hour. The hour of hauntings and suicides. F. Scott Fitzgerald remarked that in the real dark night of the soul, it is always three AM.


I don't agree with these things, and neither does the robin. Are you seriously going to tell me that all of these robins have it wrong? I mean, if anyone should know, it's a robin, right? How bad can an hour of the clock be when a bird is singing its beautiful song at the start of its new day? The robin is telling us that here is another chance to start again, if that's what is best for us. To continue, if that's what is best for us. To try. To try more. To create. To build.


Fitzgerald would often go for a line the way a greeting card writer does. I'm not saying they're comparable beyond this one way, but Fitzgerald saw commercial appeal in the aphoristic. You could see him writing tag lines for movies or copy for commercials. I don't think his heart was necessarily in the statement about three in the morning, but he had to pick a time and he wanted one where just about everyone is asleep, and you can't say four, because that's when farmers get up, and being from the Midwest, Fitzgerald knew some things about them.


But I am usually up then. And robins are up then. Most mornings I hear them, and despite the situation I am in, this thing that is worse than hell, I take a little something from their song--and also, perhaps, from my own--that helps in leading me on.


The other birds come out later. I'm listening to sparrows right now. But the song of the robin is the one to most take to heart. The robin is on to something profound, so sing as the robin sings the robin must, and let us be thankful for the reminder and guidance.



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