Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Wednesday, May 16
The robins are gone!!!
Sadly, I am not making that up…The Wife broke the news at the retailer this morning, showing me a pic of the empty nest…Well, in a suitably tragic touch, there were some recently-mowed grass clippings in the nest, but the babies were gone.
The Wife has a variety of theories: the family moved…The birds are dead…Another bird chased them out…A cat killed them.
Who knows???…I would think if a cat got to them the nest would have damaged or even destroyed the nest and not left grass clippings, but I am hardly Mr Wild Kingdom…I did suspect something was up because when I was doing the lawn Tuesday I had noticed the robins weren’t scurrying from their nest like they usually did when I was in the nest’s vicinity and before that I’d noticed there wasn’t any chirping coming from the nest, but I was too dumb to put two and two together.
I didn’t weep, but I was genuinely sad to hear this…From their first appearance last spring, when nest materials first appeared on the porch, to the laying of their eggs to hatching to departure, the robins were a treat and we were both pleased when they returned this year…The Wife says will leave the nest up for the rest of the season, just for funsies, then take it down so, perhaps, another family can start fresh next spring.
Very early on at the retailer I had consecutive men who were returning stuff they had bought for women that were not in exact accordance with what the women had specified…The first guy returned some makeup he had bought for his daughter…The other hapless bloke returned something decorative for the living room…I forget what.
This happens all the time…Us men mean well, but we are constantly coming up short in this department…Among everything else we come up short in…Why women send us for stuff will always be a mystery and the second gentleman and I discussed this at some length…We could not come up with an answer, but the gentleman had a funny when it came time for him to sign his name:
I’ll just write ‘failure’…
Later a woman brought back a curtain rod her silly man had bought that she had found wanting…I mentioned that us men try really hard and she smiled and sighed pleasantly and said she knew.
Shortly after favoring the service desk with my presence I had gotten the shift off to a great start by hanging up on someone…It was an older broad with a gravelly voice yelling at me from the get-go…She had BOUGHT SOME ALOE VERA THAT WAS ON SALE FOR FIVE DOLLARS BUT SHE GOT HOME TO CHECK THE RECEIPT SHE FOUND SHE HAD PAID THE REGULAR PRICE FOR IT!!!
Her tone made it sound like her receipt could only be checked at home and, plainly, it was was my duty to – over the phone – solve this DefCon 1 national security issue right now…I told her if she brought the receipt in I would gladly refund the difference…She didn’t even need to bring the aloe vera in…Heck, even if she had made a mistake and paid the correct price, I would have given her a couple of bucks just to shut her up.
She thought I had said I would refund the purchase price and continued to yell at me…I was tired, had just come from a full night at Hotel B, and was in no mood to be yelled at so I hung up on here…Later she called back – I recognized her name from Caller ID – and I let it ring…Eventually, someone in the back answered and I heard no more about it…She certainly didn’t come by the desk while I was there.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: Will return Thursday…There is no sleep to report since the last session.
The Diary of a Nobody is a novel. All elements are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Anything else is a coincidence.
The Diary of a Nobody was inspired by the 19th century British novel of the same name.
Read Gaylon’s latest: We The People: Making America America Again at www.GaylonKent.com
