About a Crow

This morning I was hoping to sleep late, but one of God's creatures had other ideas. A crow parked in the woods just outside my bedroom window started shouting, and kept it up for about 20 minutes. I woke up at the first angry caw and tried to dim the racket with a pillow over my head, hoping he would stop and I could return to my technicolor dream. Those are rare. Anyway, he didn't. Finally, even though it was only about five after the crack of dawn, I got out of bed. As soon as I did, the crow was quiet. I never heard from him again, but by then I was wide awake and there was no possibility of falling back asleep.

I guess it was fitting that I was awakened in that manner, today being Franz Kafka's birthday. He wrote often about alienation and mystical transformation. Kafka's most famous work, The Metamorphosis, begins: "As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect-like creature." I was quite happy that hadn't happened to me and went outside to feed the fish. Still, I wondered about that crow.