Owls and the rest of the story...

The best normal job I ever had was a seasonal position with the National Park Service in the early 1980s. One evening, for reasons I no longer recall, I was walking along the park lake and a man was sitting with a flashlight. He said he was watching baby owls learning to fly. For an hour I shared in their silent flights from branch to branch… miniature owls I’d never seen before. Years later I learned they were Saw-whet owls (Aegolius acadicus) which are native to North America.

As a designer, my jewelry work is mostly biographical on some level or another…often with connected stories to something or someone.   Mostly these stories go untold.

Last year, after keeping my park service hat in it’s original cardboard box for more than 25 years, I decided to start the half hearted effort to declutter our house. The hat had traveled with me from North Carolina to Georgia, California, Virginia, and then back to North Carolina and it was time to say goodbye to that youthful longing. It sold on ebay for four times what I paid for it…the original receipt was with it. I like to imagine it in some museum-like diorama depicting the NPS before the strangling budget cuts of the past twenty five years.

That's the rest of the story Paul Harvey.  By the way, I miss you.