Revenge of the Paste Eaters (8 page)
I expect Hoppy himself is fairly safe. When he was young and strong and got washed once in a while he was a beautiful truck, a silver-and-purple 1994 Chevy S10. He was the very first of his model and when we first went on the road together, total strangers used to honk at us and give us the thumbs-up. And he has held up well. He sags just a bit in the rear, but I’m probably the only one who notices. He has tiny imperfections in his coat. Someone lightly keyed the driver’s side door. Someone else threw him into reverse just as a dead tree sprang into his path and dented his back bumper. Due to the bad exhaust system, he roars to a start like a true muscle machine. He might choke a time or two immediately after that, and he does have that whining, something’s-in-my-fan-belt sound that last time meant he needed a new timing chain, but he always
runs.
However, I have to be honest. If I were a thief, having just robbed a bank or an ATM, for example, and I needed immediate and reliable transportation, I would probably not steal Hoppy. I would probably pedal off on some poor kid’s bike before I would steal Hoppy.
Still, I leave the pop cans in the back for the same reason people who don’t own alarm systems still slap a “This Property Protected By . . .” sticker in their windows.
This morning I went racing out into the rain and jumped into Hoppy, noticing as I did that his driver’s side door had not been shut properly and the seat was slightly damp. This was odd because I have lived with a bad hinge for a long time and I know how to close the door so the catch grips. Also, my souvenir button from a trip to D.C. to see the AIDS quilt was lying on the front seat, when normally I keep it in the crock on the floor. I threw it on the seat and roared on down the road.
I stopped at a drive-through to pick up my breakfast, reached down to the crock on the floor to get change . . . The crock was gone. The entire crock. Gone. It had not slid right, under my feet, it had not slid left, into the passenger side foot space. It was gone.
I thought, “What the . . . ?”
Someone had broken into my aging truck, parked in my own driveway, and stolen my pagoda fund. And they walked right past my pop can collection/alarm system to do it.
I bought the crock at a yard sale. Originally I was going to pot a plant in it, but to get it home I set it on the truck floor in front of my drink slots and a brilliant idea occurred to me—I would keep change in it. The crock was about eight inches across and about four inches deep, made out of crockery, and it was heavy enough to stay where I put it. (This assumption turned out to be untrue. When I step on the brakes too hard, the crock slides down and clips me in the ankle. So far it hasn’t been a problem, but if I ever seriously tried to avoid a collision I would probably wind up in a walking cast. The possibility that the crock system of change containment may not be entirely healthy has occurred to me.)
I acquire change easily. I don’t know why. I have probably $100 worth of pennies that have settled to the bottoms of my drawers and vehicle carpeting, and I routinely clean out my purse because it’s filling up again with pennies. I could see that this crock had value. I would never be able to accumulate enough change to fill that crock (she said whimsically).
About the same time I bought the crock, I fell in love with a pagoda someone had in their garden. I had a pagodaless garden, myself. It seemed unfair. Some people call them Japanese lanterns, some people call them Japanese bird feeders, I call them pagodas. They are cement. They are a garden decoration. I wanted one. My Beloved said, “Save up your money and buy one.”
My Beloved is always introducing foreign concepts into our relationship. I said, “What do you mean, ‘save’?”
She said, “You put your credit card back in your wallet, and you set aside a small amount of money each week until you have enough money to buy your pagoda in cash.”
I said, “But I have a credit card.”
My Beloved smiled at me. “But you don’t like paying the bill,” she said. My Beloved can be mean.
So every day I went through the drive-through and bought my breakfast and I threw my change into the crock and called it my pagoda fund.
This morning some enterprising thief stole my pagoda fund, crock and all.
We already know several things about this thief:
1. He can’t close a simple truck door.
2. He has some personal vendetta against the AIDS quilt. He stole my tire pressure gauge, he stole my open-ended wrench, he stole a string of Mardi Gras beads—all of these were also in the crock—but he threw back the AIDS quilt button.
3. He is desperate and probably dangerous. He’s armed with a crock. The last time the crock slid off the rise and clipped me in the ankle I think it must have weighed a good ten pounds, so this individual—we will assume he is a man, a woman would have brought her own booty bag—is (a) not clever enough to realize the bulk of his booty was aged crockery (i.e.,
heavy
), and (b) dedicated to the notion that he should get something for nothing. For instance, I have never toted the crock into the house and tallied up my pagoda fund because that crock is heavy. It was not heavy enough yet to have enough money to buy my pagoda.
On the top of the junk in the crock there was a see-through container that held my quarter collection. There was $7.25 in the container. There were other small containers in the crock that were not see-through. I suppose just looking at it from the top, that crock might have looked like a windfall. I’d like to be there when he shakes out my other quarter-shaped containers and finds himself the proud new owner of 3,000 gloriosa daisy seeds. And—as is true of all of my change collections—the bulk of the collection is not quarters, it’s pennies, so I would guess all told this individual relieved me of just about $20.
I wonder how far he had to tote that crock to find that out.
I am not feeling as kindly toward this thief as I do toward those who recycled my pop cans for me. They were at least willing to contribute a little work toward their goal. Not to mention I’ve been saving for three years and now I’m $20 farther away from having my pagoda. And it’s not what this thief stole that chafes—it’s that he entered my space. He took my stuff. He defiled that tiny, safe part of the world that is
mine
—not to mention what he may have done to my Mardi Gras beads. The world is an uglier, dirtier place because of him, and I hope he sets that crock on his own floorboard, guns his engine, and makes a hard right turn.
according to my bird
book, the house finch builds her nest in “dense foliage,” which must be why there is now a little twig nest holding five little green eggs in my hanging begonia. There is a nondescript little grayish brown bird in the nest, and she has made it remarkably clear that I should stop using my side porch from now on. She has important work to do. It annoys her to have to fly away just because I keep using the door.
Last month I was not allowed to get my mail (different porch) for much the same reason.
Before I bought my new house, I had never seen a house finch.
In truth, a day or so after I moved in, I discovered a rare, second species of American goldfinch. (According to my Beloved, it was the female.) I spied several cedar waxwings before she identified them as female cardinals, and I was hot on the trail of a pine siskin when she said, “That’s a house finch.”
I had never heard of a house finch.
“Perhaps it’s a crossbill,” I said wistfully, consulting my book: but my Beloved began chatting irrelevantly about habitat and native vegetation and other boring stuff, and then she proposed the theory that exotic birds hardly ever come to city feeders. She said, “ergo . . . ‘exotic.’” I suspect she does not have the imagination to be a really good birder.
I saw a Kirtland’s warbler the other day, but she just rolled her eyes and walked away.
According to my book, a house finch is “a sparrow dipped in raspberry sauce.” (This describes the male, of course: the female keeps a much lower profile. She looks like a wooden sparrow with all of the paint weathered off.)
(There are purple finches, as well. They look very much like a house finch, except they have white rumps. Birding, I’m finding, can be a rude sport.
Excuse me, please, but could I—ahem—see your . . .
)
According to my book, a dealer in exotic birds in Long Island avoided paying the exotic birds taxes in the 1940s by releasing his supply of house finches. Sixty years later, they are producing multiple families on both porches of my house in Michigan. Fairly adaptive for a bird that identifies a tuberous begonia as a native plant species.
I bought my new house in the winter.
I bought a bird feeder on a lark. It was a cute little wire cage that held something called a “seed cake.” I hung up my seed cake, and it sat there untouched for three months: and then one day it disappeared. In the meantime, of course, I had read several books on bird luring, and all had warned me that my birds might take their own sweet time finding my feeder, so I was surprised and delighted when my seed cake disappeared over a period of three days. What wondrous birds must be living in my back yard!
And indeed, as birds go, it was nearly miraculous. It had four feet, and a thick, bushy tail, and when I mentioned I was suspicious it was not a bird at all, it scurried down the pole and sat in the snow and chattered furiously at me. So far, my Just Say No program for seed-addicted squirrels has been a screaming failure. I bought them two bags of corn, thinking that if I fed them something appropriate, they would leave the bird feeders alone. I tossed an ear of corn out in the back yard, and twenty minutes later it was gone. Corn, cob, and all. The squirrel, on the other hand, was hanging upside down on the bird feeder. (I found the corn several months later—he planted it, kernel by kernel, in my garden. I still find his work sprouting in the lawn.)
I was discouraged, I admit, but I reasoned I had not put out enough feeders. If one feeder is good, perhaps six is half a dozen. I bought a thistle seed feeder. I bought a sunflower seed feeder. I bought a mixed-seed feeder. I bought a ceramic feeder that fell to its death, fortunately, before the ceramic birds took over my yard. I bought a hummingbird feeder. I considered a flamingo feeder, but by now my Beloved had started to get ugly. She used words like “obsession” and “compulsive spending” and “instant gratification.”
On Saturday mornings I found pleasure getting up, making myself a cup of coffee, sitting on my sunporch with Babycakes, and watching the goldfinches at the closest feeder. The cat and I were becoming one with nature.
It was about this time that nature decided to become two with me. I stepped out onto the front porch to get my mail and a bird flew away. It was clear the bird was displeased. It appeared, at least, that I could feed birds with impunity, but I was to stay off the porch when she was there.
Except she was always there. Every time I went to the front porch to get my mail, she made a big fuss about flying away. Finally I looked up, and there, in the corner of my porch roof (no visible foliage nearby, dense or otherwise), was a bird’s nest.
I could only hope Visa would understand.
Now that I am on my second family (and second porch) I have spent some time wondering what Mr. Finch does for a living. He is almost always around. He sits in the maple tree by the sidewalk and sings long and fairly complex little songs to me if I happen to be in the yard. He—or his brother, or one of his 35,000 local cousins—spends at least part of his day on my sunflower seed feeder. I have never seen him on a nest, but then, I am not allowed to loiter in the area. In my Beloved’s back yard I saw Mr. Finch procure seeds from her mother’s feeder and take it to a teenager on the fence and feed him. Perhaps, like my own father, he deals with his children better when they are somewhat older. A week or so ago my sunflower feeder ran dry, and I took it in the house, intending to fill it and return it the next morning. In the morning I stepped out into the yard and I heard . . . I feel I can justly refer to these sounds as avian complaints . . . Mr. and Mrs. Finch flying from a bush to the hook where the feeder should have been, circling the hook twice, and then flying back to the bush. They were clearly displeased.
It was becoming clear to me that feeding birds is not as simple as “If You Feed Them, They Will Come.”
I have entered into a contract, of sorts, the rules for which are quite strict.
The Rules
If you provide food once, you shall provide it forever.
A finch song is a gift of uncommon beauty, and all the repayment you should expect to receive.
Begonias are good. More, please.
Stay off the porch.
The fuzzy thing in the window should go.
in the beginning there
was nothing but a series of pressboard notebooks shoved into a bookshelf over my desk. Every now and then the writing bug would bite me and I would fire off an essay or a poem or a memory, print it out on my fine word-processing computer, and add it to the appropriate notebook. I loved to write and I loved to accumulate things, so there was nothing quite like accumulating a body of work a writer could touch and feel and measure the thickness of with a ruler when the sense of accomplishment was hard to nourish. Most started as articles I wrote for the newsletter
Lavender Morning
, a tiny publication friends put out for the lesbian community in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
It so happened that my Beloved wandered one day into my computer room, examined my notebook collection, and said, “What are you going to do with your stories?” My Beloved is a woman driven to be all that she can be.
I may have given a shrug and murmured, “Oh, I should probably do something . . .”
“You know, if anything should happen to you, they’ll be lost,” said my Beloved. “You should publish them.”
I could see it: I would die tragically one day, and the next day my siblings would hire front-loaders to knock down the walls of my writing sanctuary and haul my sacred scribblings to the dump.