A man told how he was taking his daughter to a school function. Surprisingly, for no apparent reason, the traffic coming from the other direction stopped. It didn’t take too long before the man’s lane also came to a complete halt. The reason for the stoppage was this: a mother duck was, with a fair amount of dignity, leading her brood across the boulevard. Looking neither to the right or left, fairly proud of her ability to stop rush hour traffic, the mother paraded on.
Everyone was relieved when she and her brood made it to the comparative safety of the curb. Walking across the metal bars of a storm grating, the mother kept her eyes fixed on a small pond, straight ahead. Sadly, the ducklings, with much smaller feet didn’t fare as well. The first of the ducklings slid through the grate … his disappearance didn’t stop his siblings. One after another they followed. One after another, they disappeared through the grate. They could have gone around; they could have made a detour; they had the freedom to do both. They did neither. On one level the ducklings were free, on another they were enslaved by an unerring, and unvarying instinct to waddle in their mother’s webtracks. Free, but not free.
