The other day J and I were driving around running errands when we decided to stop at the cemetery where his grandfather is buried to pay our respects. Besides this being an obviously nice thing to do, it was also cool because I like to look around cemeteries. No, I'm not into ghosts or anything, but I like to look at the headstones and the pictures and words inscribed there. The family names. The ways people are remembered. We were standing there, freezing cold by the way - the sky grey and severe wind whipping around our legs - when J heard a his favorite kind of noise and turned quickly on his heels to check out where it had come from. Before I knew what was going on or could tell him to "Calm down! We're in a graveyard!" he had sprinted back to the car to retrieve the pair of binoculars he now constantly keeps under the front seat and had made his way back to the small patch of grass where he thought he'd seen a new bird, and was shouting over his shoulder to me that "Eitan says cemeteries are really good places to bird because there's lots of well-maintained grass and not a lot of people."

This was yet another of those charming times I learn something new about the world like the fact that birds love cemeteries, and that you can be having a perfectly serene afternoon checking out the headstones when a new species alights on a nearby twig and, suddenly, life is just way more exciting.