The Early Bird Gets the News ...

I’m sitting in my writing room, eating a home-made scone, sipping on a cup of hot tea, laced with real milk and fake sugar. It’s the anniversary of 9-11, a disaster that nearly put the company I worked for out of business—but that’s a story for another day.

This morning I tuned in to a call-in talk show that asked listeners to share memories from that wretched day.

“I remember it well,” said one caller. “It was a Monday …"

Of course, you and I both know Sept. 11 was on a Tuesday that year. Such is the collective’s memory—but at least they remembered something.

A few years back, a newspaper here in the Tampa Bay area forgot to commemorate Dec. 7, 1941, which President Franklin Delano Roosevelt called “a date which will live in infamy”—not a great move in a state populated by old people with long memories.

In a century or two, who will remember Dec. 7? Or Sept. 11? Or Nov. 22, the day U.S. President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated.

This year, it will be 60 years since shots rang out in the streets of Dallas, Texas. Sixty years since CBS interrupted a telecast of the soap opera “As the World Turns” with a Bulletin saying JFK had been shot. An hour later news anchor Walter Cronkite reported “… President Kennedy died at 1 p.m. Central Standard Time…”

I was a senior at Windber Area High School in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, when news of the assassination piped over the school’s PA system. Remember it well—as well as can be expected after 60 years. Also remember walking into my Uncle Angelo’s house after going to church at Saint Anthony’s and hearing someone shout, “They shot the bastard!”

The bastard in question was Lee Harvey Oswald.

* * *

There’s a cardinal outside my window, pecking away at the bird-feeder hanging in my backyard, the one my wife just filled the other day. This is the first time I’ve seen activity out there. I guess it takes time for news to travel.

Birds and squirrels are fun to watch when the feeder is full. They don’t know what day it is … Sept.11. Nov. 22. Dec. 7. They worry about important things like, “Did the Lambs fill their bird feeder?”

Kind of makes you jealous of birds, doesn’t it?