A ROOSTER CROWED IN SINBAD'S OLD BAGHDAD

When Bernie Shaw of CNN was broadcasting from Baghdad the Wednesday night (our time) Desert Storm started, during a lull in the bursting bobs and antiaircraft guns racketing, he picked out the sound of a rooster crowing. He said it was a sound he would never forget.

Hearing that rooster myself, vicariously of course, I think it is a sound I'll never forget either. The sounds of war in that distant country, coming to me clearly via TV, were deafening, speaking of bloody death and fiery destruction. I shuddered. My eyes were misty, but when Bernie described the sound of that rooster crowing in the midst of devastating war, I'm sure I smiled and blinked away any tears.

The juxtaposition of that so innocent, so grassroots, so unconcerned-with-human-events call from that rooster was like, well, to get poetic, was like balm on a searing wound, hand on a fevered brow, rain on a parched desert. That's really too poetic. The sound was reassuring that life goes on; roosters crow when it gets light, even light from bursting bombs although in black night.

It was humorous. What was a rooster doing in the metropolis of Baghdad? And amongst all that noise? I imagine that all the barking dogs, meowing cats, braying donkeys and whining camels roundabout were silenced.

I mentally pictured a big Rhode Island Red sitting on a roost in some little hen house in a back yard. The artificial light reached his sleepy head and to anthropomorphize him, he said to himself, "Hey. Short night." He shakes his head, the read comb flapping, and looks around at his harem. "Well, another day. Get up, hens." The light from bursting bombs glistens on his burnished tail feather. He rears back proudly and proclaims a new day. "Cockadoodle." A crow heard round the world via Shaw's dramatic and touching description.

I thought, too, of the rooster Peter heard three times before the Crucifixion. Those roosters in the Middle East! They're bright red punctuation marks in the midst of world shaking events.

Before this whole troubling problem of Iraq and its capital Baghdad came into our everyday living, I'm sure my sense of the location and its part in my life was a kaleidoscope of Sinbad, Ali Baba, Alladin, magic carpets and lamps, camels, "Open Sesame," Scheherazade and her one thousand and one tales. I think I might have failed a grade school spelling test by leaving the "h" out of Baghdad. What business does that "h" have in there anyway?

Maybe down through the years, the one in the above list I've thought of most was Scheherazade. When I've wondered how long I'm going to keep this column going and I'm tempted to retire it, I think of Scheherazade and say to myself, "If she can tell a thousand and one stories, can't I?" Of course Scheherazade's life was at stake if she couldn't hold the Sultan's interest zip!

While mulling over Shaw's rooster, I tried to bring up in my mind, like coaxing a genie out of a lamp, the exact location of Baghdad. I knew, vaguely, that it was on the Tigris River. It couldn't have been historic Babylon could it, where a lot of other trouble started?

I went to my big wall map. Yep, there it was, straddling the Tigris River but about sixty miles up river from old biblical Tower of Babel. Straddling the Tigris? So, that put it partially in Genesis' Garden of Eden where once all was well.

Ah me, if we could only go back, But it wasn't in The Plan. So, we have battle sounds echoing through ancient Eden, but a rooster crowing there too, to keep us from sinking into despair.

REJOICE!