Looking at bats

Walking to the bus stop after work, I can hear singing in the distance.  As I pass through the square, I try to pick out where it's coming from.  It's "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," a good set of lungs.  A mop of blond hair, a kid in the middle of the square, filling the space.  He sounds great.  And I realize it's the same kid that I met playing the piano at Seattle Center a little over a week ago.  I don't go over, but sometimes life is an odd novel.  I don't think I'd ever seen him before last week.

Later, I went to a bat talk.  I wanted to know what the bats I'm seeing are.  The order they arrive at dusk are: Big Brown Bats (which live in houses), Silver-Haired Bats (which roost in trees), and both of which came out tonight before I walked back home, and Hoary Bats, (I think they live in trees as well, but the man said it's rare to actually see them, even though they are there.)  And a couple smaller species that he mentioned are hard to tell apart.  The bat expert just knew what order they arrived, and also was using a device to transpose the echo-location frequency to one humans can hear, and I guess different bat species come in at slightly different ranges.  It's too dark, and they fly too erratically and fast to tell any other way (minus mist-netting them.)  There were a lot out tonight.  The lingering dusk was lovely, orange, and clear. (We were watching the bats against that backdrop.)  There were probably 30-40 people there.

Walking back in the dark, and there were a lot of people still jogging, some of the people who thought ahead had flashlights, I encountered what seemed like a woman with a stroller in the distance, only to realize as I got closer that it was a man with a cart, who, upon my approach toward him, turned, and in a low stance confronted me, growling out something about cannabis as I tried to get around him.  He wasn't all there, unstable, confrontational.  He was creepy and there was no one else near at that moment of passing.  I don't think I'll be walking around (on the trail) in the dark alone now.  (A week ago there was still enough light at the same time.  It's dark enough now that you can make out shapes, general clothing, and numbers of people passing, but little other detail.)  The image that comes into my head is one of the witches from the Scottish play.

And then home, the air stagnant and hot, the traffic deafening.  Guess I'll finish reading Chekhov ("The Seagull").  It's human nature...hardly gets dated.  Not that hard to understand (the play; human nature can be hard to understand.)  So far, does not make me bleak.  I was checking.