bcegb

After setting out for my exercise ramble a few evenings ago, something a bit odd happened while I was on my route. It was about sundown and this is normally the time of day when the geese take off from these ponds and fly to another location to spend the night. The geese started their honking conversations and this means that they are about to take to flight. They normally take off in one big group and occasionally in two but this is where the oddness started.

Only two of the critters took off at first, a minute or so later three more grabbed the airways and shortly after that five more took to flight. This was odd enough but after a short time span seven more flapped loose from the bonds of gravity and a short few seconds later two more wingedly climbed into the air. Their actions were so strange that my mind pondered if there might be a deeper meaning.

The thought come to mind that maybe they had a group spat and weren’t speaking enough to each other to co-ordinate flight synchronism. Or maybe the groups just didn’t want to be seen with each other. Then a deeper thought came that these critters might be trying to send a coded message to me, since I was the only one there. I didn’t think that it was a number code, since I was reasonably sure that geese don’t use numbers or count. But were they actually smarter than I thought?

Could the numbers correspond to the alphabet? In that case 2 would correspond to ‘b’ and 3 to ‘c’, 5 would be ‘e’, 7 would be ‘g’ and the last 2 would be ‘b’ again. That would come out to ‘bcegb’ and even with my vast experience with the dictionary and crossword puzzles, I couldn’t come up with a word that I had ever heard before. The only word that even started with ‘bc’ in my dictionary was bche-de-mer, which meant a trepang – a sea cucumber used as food in Asia.

And the remaining ‘egb’ brought up only Egbert, the king of the West Saxons, AD 802-839. Basically we had a live cucumber and a dead king – and very far apart in geography and time. Maybe the word given was a scrambled one. Using this tack and still not coming up with a recognizable word, I went back to the thought process that it was two words. Putting in ‘ceb’, I came up with Cebu, an island in the Philippines – and also, according to Veggietales, another type of cattle.

Then with the remaining ‘bg’ I came up with bGH or bovine growth hormone. Now at least the two words relate to each other. Since my neighbor feeds these geese, maybe they were trying to tell me that the feed was tainted with bGH and they were getting too big to fly. OK, maybe it wasn’t that at all but instead was the goose word for ‘goodbye’ – that or just totally my imagination. In either case, I have possibly wasted several paragraphs – but the important thing was that I enjoyed doing it.

Do you get enough enjoyment or joy out of your day? In my way of thinking, real joy comes through the spiritual part of us from God. The older scriptures tells us that the joy of the Lord is our strength – in His presence is fullness of joy – and though weeping lasts for the night, joy comes in the morning. Newer verses tell us that one of the fruits of the Spirit is joy – we can rejoice with joy inexpressible – and that God desires our joy to be full. Now that is the real joy – and it lasts. ec