Just as the Swallows Return to San Juan Capistrano ...

The day the swallows are supposed to return to San Juan Capistrano, St. Joseph’s Day, is upon us.

But for those of us who sign up for Google news alerts with the words “San Juan Capistrano,” you’d think this was a near-weekly event.

That’s because when you sign up for a Google alert, it doesn’t really discriminate. You get every mention of San Juan Capistrano, whether the article actually has anything to do with our fair town or not.

If I had a dime every time an article began, “Just as the swallows return each year to San Juan Capistrano …”

Well, I’d have enough to buy a $7 cup of Starbucks coffee!

For fun (warning: I have a weird sense of fun), I thought I’d share some of the completely unrelated stories which manage to pull us and our famous migrating birds in as a simile:

A gathering of geoscientists in San Francisco. These wild and crazy dudes fly in on mechanical birds.

In this post, we get compared to the annual appearance of Dr. Seuss’s last book on the bestseller lists. That’s not bad company.

In a National Post piece, the regular return of anti-Israel “bigots” is like the return of the swallows. Um, no.

I like this analogy much better. Apparently, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater regularly visits the Bay Area. I’ve seen this troupe, and they do indeed, fly through the air, if not to San Juan Capistrano.

If you enter “just as the swallows return” San Juan Capistrano into Google’s search engine, you get 4.18 million results. You get even more, 4.5 million, if you type “like the swallows return” San Juan Capistrano.

Note to writers everywhere: This literary hook is tired. Give it a rest.

Meanwhile, , that is indeed better than any simile a writer can invent.

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