Origin Story
"Why are there so many birds? So many kinds of birds, I mean." He stops whatever is playing in the damn ear buds. "What?" "I mean look at it, the Swamp Sparrow! A nice enough bird, I guess, but is it necessary, or really different from, from . . . " She pauses, but with an audible hum that lets him know she is searching for the next word and that he should wait . . . patiently. Which he does, as if he is interested. "Every other kind of sparrow . . ." "Hmmm," he says--(She has pointed out, well, complained , that "Hmmm" is his favorite word, mentioned it more than once until he admitted, and she reluctantly conceded, that "hmmm" provided the necessary pause to slow her instinctive barrage of questions once she got going. It was the perils of a thinker marrying a talker. (Yes, they both can think and can talk, but the rates are noticeably, sometimes irritatingly, different.) ...