The Harbinger Of Spring Is A Binger

I can't say I always notice the first robin of spring. All of a sudden there are packs of robins around and I wonder how long they've been here.

This year we're awash in them. They've taken over entire trees and they're scattered in bright bunches all over the ground. The sun is peeking out, there is the promise of warmth, a loamy fragrance is in the air, daffodils are pushing up, and a young man's fancy lightly turns to the same thing it was turning to all winter; in short, it's springtime. And I look out at the robins, and I have the same thought everyone else does: have you ever seen such a collection of fat fucks in all your life?

My goodness, but they're corpulent. Everywhere you look, a red red robin is blob-blob-blobbing a lawn. It has to be the worms. Our chickadees are stuffed with seeds and look like adorable little Steiff toys, but robins are packing earthworms, and boy do they look it. They's paunchy. And no wonder. Except for a sparse allotment of random, inconsequential organs, earthworms are just big tubes of goo. And they can be huge, particularly in comparison with a robin. It's like if you or I ate a sleeping bag filled with pudding.

The American Robin's real name is Turdus migratorius, which doesn't mean what you think it means. Turdus comes from the Latin for "flush." Sorry, I meant "thrush." And migratorius is from the Latin for "to go." Okay, it does mean what you think it means. The robin can have two or three broods of babies per season, building a fresh new nest each time, probably because of the weight gain. The female lays three to five eggs. Amazingly, they're robin's-egg blue.

Robins generally hunt by sight, but presumably they can hear earthworms scootching around below the surface too, and then it's just stab-and-yank and down-the-hatch. Hard to tell how the earthworm feels about this. I personally know you can cut an earthworm in half with your thumbnail and string it on a fish hook, and both halves continue to visibly object for quite a long time, but they don't seem to die. They do indeed have a mouth and an anus and those are on opposite ends, so you'd think it would matter. But in fact, the only dead earthworms anyone ever sees are in the form of either dried-up crackers on the sidewalk or robin poop.

They definitely do not appreciate being dry. When they show up in huge quantities on the ground after a rain it's not because they're drowning  in their little tunnels. They like moisture. They're just taking advantage of a nice wet situation to make a little better time topside, but it doesn't always work out for them. They can be stranded on a sidewalk in numbers sufficient to prevent a small, sensitive girl from being able to walk all the way to school, and have to return home in tears just as her mommy was relaxing with Arthur Godfrey and a donut. Or so I'm told.

There's not a lot to an earthworm other than the goo, but even the casual observer will have noticed that thick portion that looks like a belt. This is where the sexual parts are kept, and all earthworms have both male and female parts. Even so, they do get together to swap sperm by holding those thick belts close together. The belt is called the "clitellum," which probably does mean what you think it means. The really cool part is that, after the mating, the clitellum then secretes a whole different layer of goo in a ring around the worm, which the worm dumps sperm and eggs into and then subsequently wriggles out of, as one would expect, since this is the earthworm equivalent of the wet spot. The abandoned ring closes up and becomes a cocoon for the baby worms. For a goo-based life form, it's right tidy.

This copulatory act would seem to be an opportune time for a robin to get a two-fer, but worms generally mate at night. And the big feathered fatties have to sleep it off sometime.

Yeah, Yeah, Yeah

Steve Lasko

I barely noticed when The Beatles vaulted onto the world stage, fifty years ago. Our family was a self-contained unit and didn't get real intimate with the popular culture. We did get the Huntley-Brinkley report every night, accompanied by a grumbly voice-over from my father. I knew what our political preferences were, but not why. I knew that when Steve Lasko, a boy in my fifth-grade class, hung a bumper sticker for a local Democrat on his desk ("BREAK THE BYRD-BROYHILL GRIP"), that meant he was on the side of Good, as well as being cute. I was aware of Marilyn Monroe and Playboy Magazine and Mickey Mantle and the importance of all of them to certain of my classmates. But The Beatles was just something I heard people talk about.

The only conceivable entry point for The Beatles into our house was the little radio on top of the refrigerator, but Arthur Godfrey lived in there and prevented unauthorized incursions. Sometimes he let out The Syncopated Clock and the Typewriter Song but that was about the extent of it for music.

In 1964, according to the grapevine in Miss Pope's classroom, The Beatles were going to be on the Ed Sullivan Show. That was on the wee list of programs that were allowed in our living room, but for some reason I watched that episode next door, at Susie's house. Susie was younger but she had a much better grip on popular culture than I did, and I was already beginning to pay attention to her pronouncements to avoid embarrassing myself in front of my peers. We sat on her parents' bed and tuned in. I still couldn't hear any of the music. The audience was going crackers. And there, right next to me, to my utter astonishment, my neighbor was beginning to bounce up and down and emit noises. Little proto-shrieks. It wasn't easy to acquire mass hysteria through the TV, because the reception wasn't that good at the time, so it just came out in high-pitched squeaks.

I was dumbfounded. None of this made any sense. I recognized this as a watershed moment. On the one hand, everything about the behavior rang false. On the other hand, I recognized for the first time that very soon, false behavior was going to be expected of me.

I went back home, but something had shifted. Home was the sort of sheltered environment that is sure

to drive a child to the streets to seek her own culture. And sure enough, the next year, at Karlissa's slumber party, which I was miraculously invited to, I finally heard The Beatles. They were fabulous. I'd been making fun of my classmates for two years, but I was wrong. They really got a hold on me. All I gotta do is get one of those records and play it till the groove ran smooth. It won't be long now. Don't bother me, Mom and Dad.

But how to introduce an unapproved influence into the sparse but weird family collection of classical music and Odetta and Burl Ives and Victor Borge albums? With no money? It couldn't be done. A couple years later, once I'd started babysitting, I bought my first album, Parsley Sage Rosemary and Thyme, and slid it surreptitiously into the rotation.

That seemed to go over fine. Eventually I was emboldened enough to haul in the Best Of The Mamas And The Papas. Using the same kind of logic that Portlanders employ to encourage their dogs to jump all over people, I reasoned that because "California Dreamin'" was clearly the best song ever written, nobody would mind if I cranked it up as high as the big standing mono player could push it out.

And nobody much did. The first three hundred times.