If you were alive when Apollo landed on a billion screens and the moon, would you have spared a minute or ten to go outside while everyone was in, gaze at her straight, current-free with your bare eyes, and a bunch of loons walking on the moon?
When your eye catches the early morning jogger through your misty pane, as she braces winter like a blanket with her short shorts and her music so loud it jumps out of her ears, as she keeps running without advancing while she waits on a red stubborn light, do you ask yourself, what got her out of bed, out of her warm fuzzy sheets, out of her doorstep, out on the street before the first loaf of bread, thrusting herself into the jaw of a bitter February morning that will not get warmer?
Does the Passer Domesticus and her 24 billion kin, piercing through storms straight into the sun’s lips, ruling above a million little continents, singing in chirps of exaltation close cousin in sound to chirps of distress, almost weightless, synchronized by gut feel across a thousand bands of sisters and brothers almost identical, its robe of feathers so infinitely common and so infinitely captivating, unpredictably pauses to catch a breath and a glimpse, off a hung washed shirt, then out of the belly of a gutted plastic bottle or in a puddle to hydrate in droplets that fill her up for the next flight, recognize rain water from arrogant human spit?
When you look at a spider as it patiently weaves its web in the not-so-secret junction of a rustic chair, marching through single-mindedly without a conscience from one bourn to the next, pauses hastily to recuperate, resumes in a hard-to-predict direction, fails to brace for the erratic gust laced with dense rain that mercilessly rips through the mesh now shattered and casting itself on its creator like a treacherous cape that lets the wind through, do you ever wonder how the spider feels?