I click the latest international news
documenting my daughter’s public recovery
from Internet obsession—
il Repubblica, NYT, Today Show:
     “52 Nights Unplugged!”
     “A Secular Sabbath!”
Blogs aflame, the Zeitgeist twitters, senses
an addictive flaw—
and need for new web sites
to explore the malady.

Outside my window
a varied thrush, dressed
for upland migration,
beckons. I step onto the porch,
hear a spotted towhee as it shuffles the ground;
note movement in the red stem dogwood—
someone with white eye streak, but not
a nuthatch. Now a strange
warbling from those cedars—
a traveler, not yet
revealed.

I have learned many things in varied realms from my daughter.  Of course, she serves as my tech advisor and is the webmistress of this blog.  She is, by some reckonings, a “cultural creative/early adapter.”  If the Zeitgeist has waves, Ariel somehow manages to surf the big forward curl.  I’d long noticed and forgiven her tendency to plug into Internet ethers several times each hour.  After all, it could be very useful (see Reality Check under 2007 archives).  But I wasn’t surprised when she decided the time had come to sign off a night a week.  Instantly the press picked up on this (she’s well connected to media), and once again she landed precisely in the cultural pocket.  

I was, myself, clicking away, mind off in virtual gabfests,  when the above mentioned thrush said Hey!