Growing up in Portland, I never saw a bluebird. Poor Colin! The way I heard it, they got tired of the cold weather and flew away forever. The last straw, they say, was the dag-blasted winter of 1895.
Walking to Chapman School every morning, my heart went out to the disappeared ones. Why did you forsake us? Where, oh where did you go?
I heard bluebirds, though, in the form of the Bluebird Records my father sometimes put on the hi-fi: Artie Shaw, Duke Ellington. Billie Holiday, singing for Shaw, swept the year 1938 away with her adorable “Any Old Time.”

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