bad for the gander   

    She had me up at sunrise making “Save the Geese” signs.  This must be penance for ogling that waitress with the great legs last weekend.   Instead of picnicking, we’re spending a hot and humid Memorial Day on a picket line, on about the only shadeless stretch of road in the Village of Scotia, New York.

       

    Back in 1989, a pair of Canadian geese were brought from a state game farm to our nature preserve.  As the flock grew, we’d bring the kids to see them on Collins Lake — sitting on that knoll that’s covered in bird shit today.  “Which ones are coming, Daddy?” . . . ”Which are going?” . . . ”Which ones live here?”    By now, almost two hundred of them are considered “resident birds,” staying until the 50-acre Lake is frozen and coming back in the Spring.               

bathtub spider

she wants it caught

and brought outside

    Most Scotians love the idea of hosting those honking immigrants, but there’s so much goose excrement around Collins Park, no one wants their children to play here, and the Lake and beach had to be closed last summer.  Still, the Wife and her Geese-Savers want to stop Mayor McLaughlin from euthanizing part of the flock. They say it’s inhumane and he hasn’t tried hard enough the past ten years to use nonlethal methods — like border collies and noise-makers, and the always-mysterious “egg-addling”.
         
     Except for that one guy with the graying pony tail and Birkenstocks, who keeps trying to start those lame cheers, every male on this line — from 8 to 80 — looks dispirited, drafted, drug-here.    It wasn’t enough that I gave up hunting geese years ago, to please her and the kids.   Now I’m spending a perfectly good holiday baking my buns on the pavement, not grilling burgers in the backyard.   Her crusade has become mine.   

at my pond

the geese you shooed

from your pond

   There is one consolation: my sweaty face and ”Kinky Friedman” t-shirt embarrass the crap out of her.             

   

bathroom cricket -

a spider spirals
down the drain  

- original version posted May 31, 2006 at f/k/a by the short-lived Haibun Pundit -