DUCK, REDUX

Way back in the nineties, we lived in a ground-floor apartment on the back of a building, with an entire vacant parking lot and great green lawn with picnic tables all to ourselves. We could have parties and great numbers of guests accommodated better than we could have in another wing. And there was another duck incident, but not of our own flock---well, not really, but the fact that the first two, Maurice and Velveeta, beat a path from the little fake-lake to our apartment door twice a day DID bring it about. The little couple then brought a banshee-bird with them, who squawked insistently for breakfast at our open bedroom window beginning at 5 a.m., day after day. We named her Miranda, just wishing she would remain silent, etc.

 THEN, the crowds grew, and we had go to the used bread store for enough to keep them fed, and when they brought their babies in little bobby lines, our lawn began to take on the look of a lakeside latrine. We tried stopping the feeding sessions. They gathered, muttered to themselves---probably dark and dire things about US, then began a clamor that the neighbors could hear, I’m sure. Radio Free Europe could have heard THAT lot.

 So we gave in on the bread, and hosed down the lawn twice a day, for we knew we'd be moving soon. When we moved to the third-floor apartment over by the lake, they STILL gathered under our balcony, and we’d Frisbee bread down, especially when the lake was frozen, so they’d have something to go in their little bellies. But while we were still on the ground floor, I would go out and sit on the patio with my earliest cup, while the birds gathered. There were probably sixty or seventy by then, all mingled with some white ones which had been there from when the place was built. 

 One morning, as I sat on the concrete, a white one appeared in the crowd, and got fairly near me. I could see a big tangle of fishing line all curled and snarled around one leg, so I coaxed him nearer with some bread. He got right up to my lap, so I stepped on the line and hugged him with both arms. He went into squawk-and-flap mode, with me struggling to get up off the concrete with my arms full of irate duck. I went in yelling for Chris, who came running to the clamor, stark naked and soaking wet, just out of the shower and thinking marauders had me. 

 We DID get the duck into the house for the snipping of all that cord, and I’m sure somewhere there’s a Candid Camera crew bewailing the fact that they missed out on the sight of two hefty middle-aged folks, one wet and naked, the other hanging on for dear life and laughing hysterically, cutting 15-pound test off the leg of a squawky, flappy duck.