It's morning on a day of high broken clouds that seem to promise a dry day. But my wildlife biologist father woke up to this sky this morning in a hospital bed, where he has found himself for something that we hope is relatively minor.

We talked by phone last night. He would rather come home, but has made a reasonable peace with his circumstances. It's a fine hospital with a kind, competent staff, and Mom had reported that he has a room with a view out across evergreen forests to the Olympic Mountains. "Are you by yourself?" I asked. "No," he answered, "there are the bugs."

I thought that might have been his own funny name for other patients, but he meant a ladybug and two other round-bodied bugs. "So it's spring here in this room," he reported. He has been enjoying watching them moving about the room.

Steve McQueen once said that he would rather wake up in the middle of nowhere than in any city on earth, and I bet Dad would agree with him. Dad spent his career as a pilot-biologist in Alaska. On a January day such as this one, he might have found himself flying to Kodiak ferrying supplies to a field camp, or perhaps over Arctic Ocean ice floes surveying polar bears. Or he might have been skiing with me up a mountain valley in the Chugach Range above Anchorage, reading the animal prints in the snow to decode the recent activities of moose and coyotes.

Part of the art of Being Here Now, I suspect, is that if one day, you find yourself no longer a young biologist in a parka and mukluks, but an 84-year-old man in a hospital bed, you just enjoy the ladybug that you find in the room with you.