"Messenger of Wisdom"

Tuesday, April 28, 2009
6:07 pm My allergies are killing me.

Well, today was my last day at my internship, and it was definitely bittersweet. I won't miss schlepping out to Watertown twice a week, but I will miss a lot of the people there. It was a fun job, overall, and I'll miss all the media contacts I had email relationships with, whose faces I will never see.

There's this path outside the magazine's building that runs along a narrow strip of the Charles River. I didn't know about it in January, when I started, but once the snow melted away it became my little short cut. I ran along it each morning on my way to work and each evening on my way to the bus, gulping in fresh air as I listened to my Ipod.

A couple weeks ago, the day I found out I didn't get a job I wanted, I was walking along the river to my bus when I saw this weird bird. I thought maybe it was a crane, but I didn't even know if they lived up here. All I could make out was its dark silhouette as it stood alone on a bank under a bridge.

I saw it again last Friday when I found out I was chosen as the commencement speaker for COM. I was sitting on a bench during my lunch break, on the phone, when I saw it pop its head out of the water. It didn't even look like it was swimming... it seemed to be just walking through the water, body completely submerged, its long neck bobbing under the water and then popping back up again. It cracked me up. I looked up cranes on Wikipedia and found that in Chinese culture they are considered messengers of wisdom. I liked that. But then I found out that adult cranes don't like to swim, which ruined my theory, but whatever.

I was looking for the not-crane when I left work today. It walked in the water next to me as I made my way down the path and up onto the bridge. When I got to the bridge, I paused for one last look at it, but I couldn't find it.

Then it stuck its head up again from the depths of the middle of the river, and I watched as it swam away, making ripples in the water.

Love,
Tara