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.)

"Well," he says.

"Well," he says again (Yes, "well" is the most annoying word in his lexicon.)

"Well," he says for the third time, "The world is old, you know, and big and in the beginning there was only one sparrow, the sparrow primo. . ."

 

"Must have been lonely," she says in an effort to sound interested.

"Well, maybe so or maybe not, but you can't always plan everything. But one day near the beginning of everything, Sparrow Primo happened to see itself in a clear pool of water and having only the brain of a bird . . . "

"So, a bird brain?"

"Exactly! The sparrow invited the image to rise. It came out of the surface of the water and, as you would expect, given the probable trajectory, crashed right into Sparrow Primo. It was such a pleasurable sensation, that, well you know, they got together and . . . "

"And," she said, "soon were laying eggs by the dozen, eggs that . . . "

"Hatched and new sparrows were born."

"Thank you," she said. "I knew you would have an answer."

He takes a modest bow, snaps the ear buds back into place, and returns to the real world of constant, verifiable information.