Welcome 2020

For the advent of a new decade, never mind a new year, I feel I should come up with something profound, but sadly the mind is shut down, on strike, apparently, like the birds in a very silly poem I wrote not long after arriving back from the West Coast.

I thought I had posted this in the early stages of my blog, but that was probably one of my initial attempts that went the way of many of my efforts to master technology. Flying around somewhere in the stratosphere, probably, which is where both of my current printers are going to be as soon as I get to the front door.

Grant came running to see what was wrong and witnessed my Canon printer spitting paper at me, from the wrong end. This after the printer cartridge had gone mad and thumped back and forth in a frenzy. I’ve had the thing less than a year and I swear, I have not mistreated it. But printers and I do not get along.

Anyway….here is a silly poem…with a postscript: It’s called “The Hannaford’s DD Birds”

 If you want a cart at Hannaford's 
You'll have to get it From the DD birds. 

You'll see them sitting
All in a row,
Seniors on handles,
Juniors below.
Having a union meeting,
Or maybe just a chat,
About the latest doings
Of the local great fat cat.

But mostly they are working
Jim Jim and Jolly Jack
They're the two shop stewards
The leaders of the pack.

"Come and get your shopping carts
Chickadee, chickadee,
Come and get your carts from me,
They are free
Chickadee.
I only ask one thing of thee
That you bring them back to me
Chickadee, chickadee."

Now we're near the holidays
So jolly and so gay,
But not for Jimbo's working team
Some folks are just so mean.
The parking lot's awry
The carts have gone bye bye.
"We've got lots more in storage
But it'll mean
A full work stoppage.
Chickadee, chickadee, chickadee!"

Did you know
That it's a union shop?
Where the birds all skip and hop.
Hannaford's they call it.
Greenwich is where it's at.
The birds have taken over,
Your head you'd better cover,
Unless you're nice
To the DD birds
At Greenwich Hannaford's.
"Chickadee, chickadee."

• 

• 

• 

The first thing I noticed when we went to check out our new supermarket was the singing of little birds. It was a familiar song, “chickadee, chickadee”, which is why we’ve always called them the “DD” birds. In fact I’m not sure those particular birds were chickadees. Perhaps they had just purloined their song. To me they looked like plain little brown jobs (sparrows, most likely) but their song was very endearing and I always stopped to talk to them.

“Hi, little dickie birds!”, I would say, “can I have a cart?”

“Chickadee”, they would reply, “help yourself.”

And then I would tell them how sweet they were and that they should come to my garden because then I would feed them.

In the Spring, a few weeks later, we fed a lot of birds, including a few little brown jobs, but they would fly in and then take off, back to wherever they came from.

Recently, however, low and behold, the hedges and trees have been full of little birds singing up a storm:

"Chickadee, chickadee, chickadee
Where's the food you promised we?"

I have this image in my mind of Grant and I loading our groceries into the Subaru and a little conversation taking place over by the cart return:

"Hey, here they come...
Yo, Joey, go follow that car, see where they go."

(Yes, we did have a bird called Joey once!)

The fact is, those DD birds at Hannaford’s? They aren’t there anymore. So maybe they did follow Joey to my place. Stranger things happen all the time, right?