I look out my office window, out on the ugly, sleet-blasted world , and I see.. a flock of seagulls. No. not the bad New Wave band, but herring gulls, about 30 or 40 of them, circling in smaller packs of white and grey like a flurry of feathers. They're flying in formation with the usual squadrons of pigeons that frequent the neighborhood (and stage hit-and-run raids on my backyard birdfeeder). Flashes of Alfred Hitchcock films are projected from my memory.

And then, the mob is gone, off to raid another trashcan somewhere else. Or maybe one of them spotted the red-shouldered hawk that I saw swoop down on an unsuspecting rodent in the alley last week; he hangs out on streetlights around here.