Oh, the nectar! What a day, boys and girls! Drink up!  Heck, we can make a day of it!

What? What’s that I hear you saying? Not so much time today? Can’t drop everything just to join a nectarfest?

Gotta keep on the go? Gotta long hard drive in front of you? Got places to get to? Maybe in the fast lane? Well, what do you know! That blue sky stretches a heck of a long way!

It’s surely a good day, too, to take a driving lesson. Learn how to make it down the road without whacking your front fender into or raking your side door along a telephone pole. We’ve got a few of those here in Shizuoka City, as you well know.

And it’s surely a good day, if you need to, to jump into a speeding train . . . and a good day as well, no doubt, to . . .

. . . jump back out again.

But me, I decided to stick with the nectar.

In the morning, just when I was getting a good layer of that fragrance built up on my beak, I saw my buddy Steve on his bicycle, heading off for that university he works at. He stopped to say hello (he often does), but when I invited him up to the branch to suck from a blossom or two, he said he had to get going. The way he said it, I knew he wanted to stop and spend some time up here. It made me feel a little guilty—but no way I was giving up this day.

Still, I felt like doing something for him. So I told him what we mejiro know instinctively. (I never have understood clearly exactly how much human beings feel these sorts of things.)

It’s in the air, I said. Pink and lavender clouds, over there in the east, this evening.

I pointed my beak at Yatsu Mountain.

From here, I said, it’s only two minutes or so up to the best viewing spot. Might be mighty spectacular. Hold on, for a human being, it might take fifteen.

So wasn’t it a joy when Steve came by this morning to thank me for the cloudcast. He said he’d put his nose to the grindstone, got his work done, and got up on Yatsu Mountain just in time. He said that I had “hit it on the nose.” Those were his exact words.

Then he asked me what I thought of crows. He seemed to have some newfound affinity for them, so I didn’t say that you’d never find one on a guest list of mine. I just said that I’d never really talked to them much.

So he told me that while he was sitting there, up on Yatsu, looking out at Mt. Fuji and the pink and lavender, a dozen or so crows suddenly swooped down on a citrus tree, wrestled the fruit, and sent four plummeting down to the trail. The three they’d gotten their beaks into didn’t roll very well, but one (he said) rolled right down to where he was sitting.

Now do you believe that?

Before he went on his way (on to his university for another day, I guess), he asked me why I hadn’t told him about the sunset.

Do I have to tell you everything! I peepy-peeped down to him. He smiled and took off.

Looks like another grand day to me.  Man, this stuff is good!!!