Birds are marvelous things, really. Colorful and exotic, paying their fast visit over a bite and a song before spiriting away on the next wind. Theirs is a transitory sort of happiness I can only long for in my dreams.
I have a busy but fairly fixed schedule, auditing insurance claims at our office in Kansas City. I’d joined the Couch Surfing network some time ago with every intention of making a trip, but with the inevitable reality that I would only play a host. Which is just as well, really. I have a nice apartment, fitted out for dinner parties and the like. But again, being unmarried and fairly busy I’ve had scant chance to make use of it.
So it came as a pleasant surprise when I received my first email, asking me to host a cross-country bicyclist from New York. How thrilling! He was waiting with his bike on the pavement outside the building when I returned from work. Over dinner I worked out that what I had before me was a trust-fund Martin, making a southwestern journey to The Valley. It was an extraordinary conversation for me, listening to tales about similarly kind strangers in far-off lands like Pennsylvania and Indiana; of road-hogging assholes in un-green pickup trucks and having to cope with the constant threat of rain and wind or running out of bottled water. He crashed on the couch and by morning he was gone, leaving a note on the counter thanking me for my hospitality and apologizing for the loaf of bread he’d taken with him. Needless! It was a breath of fresh air for me, a cool breeze with which to temper the stagnant boredom of my hitherto life.
Subsequent surfers came, sometimes several a week or once in a month. They often came alone, but would sometimes travel in pairs, trios, and once in septuplicate. There were all kinds: thick-kneed coots and lucky ducks, thieving bustards, garrulous self-trumpeters, and unabashed babblers. There was once a future cardinal, accompanied by a brace of penguins I took to be his toadies. And I entertained a group of jaegers coming back from shooting deer in Iowa, who expressed an utter contempt for crows once the beer began flowing. A bit of a conversational albatross, really; like the recovering heron-addict who turned out to be a missionary out for my soul. But there were hawks and doves parroting their party lines, and a shag or two (to my credit) to pass the night (for larks). They were plains-wanderers all, and I had the uniquely good fortune to give them a place to rest their travel-wearied bones.
And every morning when I leave for work, I go with a song on my lips brought to me from afar, perhaps to be never heard again.
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