I run my dogs early every morning. Okay, for the benefit of the fact-checkers, they run and I walk.
We always go through some woods that I own, and we have been doing this for years.
Over the past four or five years, while running the dogs in the woods, I would often hear a particular barred owl hooting somewhere overhead in the trees.
Most barred owls hoot a familiar refrain: “Who, who, who cooks for you all?”
This barred owl, however, was different. His hoot consisted of only a simple “who.”
Evidently, he couldn’t care less who was doing your cooking. Maybe he delighted in pretending to be an intellectual by posing that eternal question — “who?” — to all his woodland friends, making them wonder about their own existence and how they fit into this universe.
Or maybe not.