Fooled again by imposter

I jumped a bit when I saw the owl.

It was more than a foot high, standing majestically.

I was not.

I was standing much less than majestically, firing up the grill on a Saturday night.

But as I watched the coals begin to develop to the right level for cooking, the owl caught my eye.

What an odd place to perch, I thought.

There it was, in a corner of a gazebo/swingset that our neighbors Roger and Nancy Jonas had installed.

And then I noticed that it didn't move.

And then I realized it was a fake, made of plastic or ceramic or resin, intended to scare away predators or other unwelcome birds.

A split second later, I had a moment of déjà vu.

Sorry to say, I had made this same stupid mistake once before.

It happened when I was about 10 years old and was walking home from the Presbyterian Church on a Sunday morning.

For some reason, I was by myself when I looked up at the chimney at Ed Ewry's house, which was next door to ours.

Wow, I thought, I've never seen anything like that.

There they were, perched facing north, south, east, and west on the Ewrys' chimney, four owls, standing stock still.

I stopped on the sidewalk and stared at them.

They didn't move an inch.

I waved my arms.

They didn't move an inch.

Amazing, I thought. I'll bet I'm the first person to ever encounter this remarkable scientific phenomenon of four owls perched on a single chimney, arranged to face the points of the compass.

As I hurried home, I kept looking back to make sure.

But they didn't move an inch.

In my mind, I was already drafting the ultimate elementary school science fair project.

I could see the headlines now: Kid discovers owls with sense of magnetic north. Kid finds secret of stoic owls. Kid trains owls to do his bidding.

(Okay, that last one was a little far-fetched.)

It was at Sunday's noon meal that I shared my discovery, as I recall.

I could barely contain my enthusiasm. After all, I had seen these astonishing owls, stoic, impervious to distraction, arrayed upon the Ewrys' chimney at the points of the compass.

And then the boom fell.

They were fake, of course. The equivalent of scarecrows, intended to keep birds from building nests in the chimney.

There was a measure of humiliation on my part, but when I went out and checked after lunch, sure enough, the owls were store-bought fakes.

They'd probably been there my whole life, just waiting for the moment when I'd look in their direction.

So this weekend, when I made the same silly mistake again, momentarily, I couldn't immediately decide whether this was an indication that I'm slipping as I grow older or a sign that I still see things the way I did when I was a kid.

I'm putting my money on the latter.[[In-content Ad]]