Sunday in the Park

I think the old Irving Berlin song went something like this…”When I’m worried and I can’t sleep, I count my blessings, instead of sheep. And I fall asleep, counting my blessings.” It is such a lovely sentiment. And I wish I could follow that simple advice. But days spent in front of a computer and attached to my cell phone and sitting in meetings and running to more meetings leaves me, often, in fits of restlessness, really lost in my ability to recognize enough blessings to count.

So instead, I turn on the BBC. The radio, not the television version. And I lay in the dark, listening to those lovely foreign accents and sometimes, if I’m very lucky, it is enough to send me into dreams of countries I can imagine and even remember some of the lovely places I’ve been.

But mostly, on restless, worrisome nights, it gives me new fuel to fret about. There are stories from Rome and Bagdad and Jerusalem. Tokyo and Madrid and New Delhi. But mostly, the core of the news is from the UK. No one says United Kingdom anymore. And those Brits especially, have a way of putting a spin on a story. Just the other night, I heard about my friend, the red robin and how he has chosen to sing his own sweet song on a different schedule.

It turns out a study, somewhere in Britain, discovered Mr. Robin has taken to singing at midnight. Which, in that half-dream state, had me seeing Mr. Rockin’ Robin, with a bit a swagger, in cowboy boots, sounding a great deal like Patsy Cline and crooning, “I go out walkin’ after midnight, in the moonlight I go out walkin’ thinkin’ ’bout you.”

But the story was far more serious than all that (it was the BBC after all) and here’s what I think I heard. Mr. Robin is bit of vain fellow. He likes the hall pretty still before he performs. He also likes to hear the sound of his own sweet song. Which, apparently, is rather difficult to do in the big city these days, as the sun comes up. Because, as anyone who has spent time in a bad hotel in big city knows, long before the sun comes up, the city gets up. The garbage truck starts hauling. The traffic starts snarling. Horns blare, sirens scream. The construction truck has the beep, beep, beep, back-up noise and then we humans, add to that, with our incessant chatter on our cell phones. All of which makes the stage rather crowded and Mr. Robin can’t hear the song of his own voice.

So, as this story goes, or at least how I remember it, the bird with the bright, red chest, puffs himself up, around midnight these days and lets loose with his full-throated song. I can’t remember if the commentary that followed said it was a sure sign the planet was doomed or if I dreamt that part.

What was especially unsettling for me — besides the fact I had a huge presentation the next day I felt woefully unprepared for — was this story kinda dove-tailed if you will, with one I also heard on NPR about the bees. And this one has gotten more play, even late night television hosts have started playing with the information. Which I think goes something like this.

The honey bee is disappearing.

Actually, they are just taking off for flight into Nectarland and never coming back. And nobody, nobody can figure out why. Why should you care? It makes one less pest to deal with, at the summer picnic, you might say. Consider this, Einstein said if the honey bee disappears, we’ll have about four more years of civilization left. The whole process of them pollinating flowers and plants is what keeps us connecting. Nature doesn’t have the joy of procreating without the bee. And if nature doesn’t procreate, neither do we. Gives a whole new meaning to buzz kill doesn’t it?

Theories abound, from those stories I’ve listened to, in the wee small hours of the morning. Of course, some illness and blight was suspected but none has been found. Global warming could be an answer but nobody knows quite how to connect those dots yet. And our appendage of choice, the cell phone, has also been named as a fellow defendant. Some folks conjecture that the cell towers emit some kind of high-pitched buzz only in the sonar range of the bees who are drawn, like a siren’s song to it. But here’s the real mystery. No one can find the bees. If they were sick and dying there should be piles of dead bees, say alongside those cell towers, or on the floor of the forest, or in the center lane, or center field. But the bees are gone.

Beekeepers tell stories of taking hives filled with bees into new areas to help with the pollination process, say, of the rather frigid almond trees who are wholly dependent upon their sex therapy, to make the ever increasingly, popular, highly nutritious, heart healthy, and did we mention oh-so-lucrative, nut. The beekeepers have placed the hives in time-honored spots and invited the bees to get their groove on and make a li’l honey. But the bees leave the hive and just keep on going. Spring themselves from the joint and never return. And here’s the increasingly weird part, they don’t reappear somewhere else. Dead or alive.

We are left to ponder if the bees, like the Mayans before them, have just reached some greater frequency of vibrations and are vanishing to another world, without a trace. Scientists are completely stumped on this one. And in the meantime, nature is trying to figure out how to reproduce itself without the help of the honey bee. As Einstein pointed out, it’s not in the cards. No doubt, there are researchers the world over, working on this problem as we sleep. Ah, if only we could sleep.

I am left to ponder about the state of the world if here and now in springtime the birds and the bees are confused as to their respective traditional roles. Somewhere, I remember a quote that went something like this,

“Faith is the bird that sings before dawn.” So now I wonder, was it faith? Or was it vanity? That performer needed the audience’s rapt attention, waking them from, no doubt a seamless slumber, to belt out what we’ve always considered a sweet morning song. If the robin is forced to compete with the drunks in the midnight choir, will he sober them up long enough to listen to him?

Last night, after a dinner with the best of friends who make me both laugh and think, I came home and had one of those nights where sleep came easily. I awoke up before dawn, glad I had spent the time filling the bird feeders the day before. There were sweet songs abounding. The mourning dove, warblers and goldfinches.

And the Robin. Singing his own sweet song.

I counted it right away as a blessing. And a sign. So I’m throwing the camera in the car, along with a couple of books and driving to a place where there is no cell phone reception. I plan to be on the lookout for honey bees. It is the perfect time of year that invites exploration on a Sunday, not spent in the Park