Zigzagging birds and final words

Dispatch from Nina:

Sometimes it appears that JFW brings together the sick, the lonely and the dispirited, with an occasional happy soul thrown in (you know who you are!) just for balance.

“Oh no, not me” you say. “I live an ordinary life. I just especially care about the fate of …feral children... Or, slightly lesser on the scale of injustices -- dating for doughnuts... Or the worth of sausages.” Oh my, hand me just a short day in a repressed society again!

I do not want to appear dismissive here. Every hapless soul has a place on this planet. But have we lost our sense of perspective sometimes, to say nothing of our reserves of positive energy? When I go back to Poland each year, people there always marvel at how “exotic” Americans’ personal problems are. You need only ride the taxi from the airport to downtown Warsaw before you begin to understand what I mean by that.

JFW trackers, you don’t understand how good life is to you!

As I wind up this short period of guest blogging here (to be replaced by the Lonely Doughnut Man? Oh dear.), I have to say it’s been… educational. Okay, fun as well. I’ll end with a Polish Proverb – and this one various people out there have heard me tell:

Once there was a flock of cold birds, shivering and shaking as the winter fast approached (these are Polish birds, but you can pretend they’re from the Dells). They sensed it was time to head south. They dusted off their traveling feathers, got into their formation, cranked up their flying motors and headed (toward Italy? Florida? Choose your side of the ocean) in a beautiful V that spread across the pale winter sky and made the people below look up and stare with wonder. But at the end of one line, a small bird could not get it right. She zigzagged this way and that and found it impossible to maintain that perfect symmetry. Finally she said “forget it, I’m going to wait out the winter here.” She fluttered down and found a barn that provided shelter for the cold season (in Poland I might add that she drank plenty of vodka and sang beautiful ballads with fellow barn-inhabitants all winter long). In spring, she looked up and saw her fine feathered friends pass overhead. Are you leaving? Asked the barn inhabitants. No, I am happy here, she answered as she soared up to sing a reprise of “Fly Me to the Moon” (elsewhere I’d say ‘Lato, Pachnace Mieta’), with an attempt at harmony with a slightly off-key swallow.

Is there a punch line? A bit of wisdom lodged there somewhere? A moral to be learned perhaps? I used to provide one when I told the story – typically as a toast on some special occasion. But JFW readers are an imaginative bunch. Make one up for yourselves!

Thanks, JFW editorial board for the honor of allowing me to post on this extraordinary, punchy, antic and ridiculously witty blog. I’ll return with a postscript from Poland next month.