You know, there's nothing like birds in spring telling you that summer's coming.

And Mayor Laurie Lightfoot, aka Mayor Phallus Maximus, keeps telling us inner strident bird

voice sounds like a velociraptor of the summer of joy. Just wait for it, she says.

Till Memorial Day and our summer, it will be the summer of joy in Chicago.

And folks, just wait till Memorial Day and our summer, it will be the summer.

And folks, just wait till Memorial Day and our summer, it will be the summer of joy in Chicago.

The Cardinals are out in the backyard and Robins pick for worms in the vegetable garden.

And these are the sounds of joy in spring. And of course, if you live in Chicago,

you hear those other sounds. Not the morning birds, not the Cardinals are the Robins.

You hear the nightbirds. And those nightbirds, they bring death and they bring pain.

A while ago, you could count on news columnists to fill up a column or two with whimsy of spring.

You know the kind of column I'm talking about?

Most often written by librarians with too many cats in their apartments. But even though I don't like cats,

I did it too. And I'm not a librarian. The joys of spring, the odes to spring.

I'd write about the garden.

But you don't need that now. You don't need columnists to tell you when spring's coming.

You don't even need those Cardinals and Robins. All you need to do

to look at the summer that's to come and the warming weather right now in spring.

All you need to do is to look into the eyes of a Chicago Fire Department paramedic

after a shift. They take their shoes off outside the home. Why? Because they don't want to track

the blood or brains in that they just stopped it. I know a guy, a friend who'd stand out on his back

porch alone with his wife and kids asleep inside and think about what he'd just seen.

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