Yesterday I timidly asked Clarice if she would like to accompany me to the
multiplex of overly loud cinemas and see "Titan A.E", an animated space
opera. "No way. I like plot, and plot a cartoon ain't got" or something to that
effect. No matter, I would have the popcorn to myself.

Sat through the anime and was impressed. This sort of cinema is a great art
form for otherwordly, very ethereal, beauty. The dialog and square jawed
characters with perfect white teeth all sucked, but scenes like the space
wake fairies drifting in the "ether" behind the spaceship that would later join
up with the unwordly blue bad guy space "stinger" ships were wonderful.

So now I'm walking back to my gasoline guzzling cocoon car and belching a
little popcorn and Reese's peanut butter cups when I have to cross an
asphalted area on the nether side of the mall, the sort of backwater that is
just as unbiological as a space opera animated movie, where there are big
loading docks with monster earth trailers backed up to immense doors to
unload plastic piffle to the mall stores. There is a landscaped and just a little
unkempt area to my left, sloping to the freeway, and these loading docks
with big, uncabbed, trailers to my right.

Just as I got to my car a violet green swallow swoops me on her way across
from hunting above the unkempt territory. A lot of people have noticed that
violet greens fly like little fighter planes. Not like blue animated space opera
ships but like little spitfires from the Battle of Britain. This girl made a
twisting banked turn and flew under a Fruehauf trailer and swooped up and
disappeared. No, really?

I stood beside my car watching the trailer. Just then I noticed the car parked
beside mine wasn't empty. A suburban mother probably waiting for an
offspring was looking at me, in this rather empty back parking lot, with more
than a little apprehension. I smiled, she didn't. But then Ms. Swallow flew
back out and went back to vacuuming bugs.

I looked around to make sure security wasn't too close and then walked over
and scooted under the trailer. A small hole where a hydraulic hose
disappeared up into the belly of the box was rocking out with baby swallow
chirps, coming from inside. I kneeled under the trailer and just listened. Ms
Swallow had turned this huge semi trailer into a container for a nest box.

I had just been enthralled by a modern art form where everything was drawn
by humans and not a single living thing appeared, where Earth's salvation lay
in (according to what story there was) in banking the DNA of all the extinct
critters in a space ship. Now I was in the 21st Century form of the same
biological separation, and here were all these little swallow voices just out of
site behind a metal plate and a plastic hose full of hydrocarbons. Maybe
biology will outsmart us, after all.
Jerry Broadus
P.O. Box 249
Puyallup, WA. 98371