Dying with Laughter

Some days you just need to take a deep breath…

and read the Office Poop Survival Guide.

Posted by: ssjane | July 12, 2006 | 2:35 pm
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Bye, Bye Birdie

A few years ago, while living in the house in Woburn, we had an incident between Flacko and a baby bird.

I had seen a baby bird by the fence that day and wondered if it was abandoned. Then I did some online research and realized that it was normal for the baby bird to just sit there because it was still learning to fly, and its parents would come back regularly to feed it. This realization was helped out by the appearance of said parent bird, who flew angrily at Flacko’s head when he later tried to either play with the baby bird or eat it.

Luckily, that baby bird managed to hop under our fence and into the neighbor’s yard, and that was the end of Flacko’s fun. For the rest of the day, though, he kept peeking through the fence at it and looking imploringly at me. Clearly, he felt the bird was a far better toy than the approximately 4629 other toys we had bought for him.

This morning I let the dogs outside. The birds were sqawking louder than usual, so I looked up, wondering if there was a nest or some kind of bird party above me. Then I looked down, and noticed that both Mina and Stanley, the Former Flacko, were peering up at the siding on our garage.

I bent down to see what they were looking at, and was startled to see a baby bird on the ground near the dogs.

Stanley noticed the bird at the same time and chased it before I could stop him.

The baby bird wobbled into the air, managing to get a foot or two above the ground, and nearly flew into Paco’s head as it made its way to the far side of the chicken wire we use as a fence. Unfortunately, it didn’t have the height yet to fly over the wire to the dog-free side, and landed miserably on the ground.

Stanley bounded after the bird, and as I ran after him yelling, I saw what appeared to be Stanley picking up the bird in his mouth.

Two adult birds shrieked and flew after Stanley as I chased him away. Attracted by all the noise, Paco wandered over, walked on or over the baby bird without appearing to notice it, and then ran away when he saw me waving my arms and yelling at him for what he felt was for no good reason at all.

Now all three dogs were huddled by the garage door–Stanley fearfully, Paco sulkily, and Mina obliviously. Mina, in fact, was still staring at the siding and appeared to have not noticed any of the bird chase and ensuing commotion.

When the adult birds settled down and disappeared into the magnolia tree, I walked over to the baby bird. I’d been thinking for some time about putting the dogs on a raw diet, but having them gobble down a baby bird wasn’t quite what I had planned. Sure, it was only natural selection at work when occasional baby birds died before reaching adulthood, but selfishly, I didn’t want my dogs naturally selected away by said baby bird’s parents.

The baby bird’s eyes were open, but one of its wings was outstretched oddly. I hoped it wasn’t broken, but I wasn’t sure. I knew I needed to get it on the other side of the chicken wire away from the dogs, but had no idea how. Should I just nudge it over with my foot? What if I hurt it more?

I didn’t want to to touch the bird in case I left some kind of smell on it that would keep the adult birds from caring for it, and okay, maybe I was a little grossed out by the thought of touching it. So I lifted the edge of the chicken wire and tried to move it to the other side of the bird.

The bird wasn’t quite close enough to the edge of the fence for this technique, and I didn’t have enough slack in the wire. Although I was trying to be careful, I nudged the bird a few times with the wire. The bird was still. So still, that I was beginning to think it was already dead when suddenly its little beak opened wide and a piercing yell came out of it.

A piercing yell came out of me, too, as I dropped the wire and ran back toward the dogs. I knew what happened after little babies yelled–mommies and daddies came swooping in with murder in their hearts.

The dogs were still clustered around the garage door. Even Mina, who was usually deeply interested in any kind of wildlife, particularly of the squirrel family, was still looking at the siding. She also had dried grass stuck to the side of her mouth from when she’d tried to root around in the dirt to find out where the baby bird smell was coming from.

I scooped her up and ran into the house with the boys following closely behind me. I slammed the door behind me and the dogs and only then did I start feeling safe. It was nice having a half acre of land between our house and the neighbor’s, but rabbits, coyotes, and tons of ticks were more wildlife than I was prepared to deal with. And the baby birds? Let them hop around in someone else’s yard. I didn’t have time to deal with their parents.

Posted by: ssjane | July 6, 2006 | 3:00 pm
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A Conversation Between Two Men

“Hey, man.”

“Hey, brother. What’s going on?”

“So I need to ask you something weird.”

“If I don’t think it’s weird, what does that say about me?”

“Your family’s okay, right?”

“I guess so.”

“Your parents?”

“Yeah.”

“Because my mom heard something weird from the neighbor of another neighbor in the old neighborhood who told my mom that your dad passed away.”

(pause)

“I’m pretty sure they would have told me about that…but I guess I better call home.”

Postscript: Chris’s dad is not dead, and was surprised to hear he was supposed to be. Someone on his street did die suddenly, but it wasn’t him, and their street is still a two and a half hour drive from the old neighborhood where the news had spread.

Posted by: ssjane | July 5, 2006 | 2:21 pm
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