Sometimes You're the Bird....Usually, You're the Windshield

I have another Moleskine sketchbook in which I'm keeping a collection of illustrated stories from my childhood. Here is one such story: We lived in Liech, Germany, in a small apartment on the second floor of an old building, above a bakery. Every morning we woke to the fantastic smell of broetchen fresh from the ovens, which would rise up the steep steps to my family's apartment. (Once, I took two steps down those stairs, and tumbled all the way down them, like in a cartoon.) One wintery day, my mother asked me to take the garbage downstairs to the dumpster behind the bakery. On the way, I looked down to find a shiny 5-mark coin, lying face up and magestic in a pile of sidewalk snow. Like accepting a gift from the skies, I excitedly plucked it from the snow, ecstatic about the prospect of my newfound fortune. I stood and smiled, reflecting on my luck. Suddenly I felt a jolt...something wet...and discovered at that moment, to my great displeasure, that a bird had pooped directly in the middle of my head. ...That's always been my luck.