Flailing Away at Windmills
Fond Memories of a Pet Pigeon
Don Quixote
and I are brothers. Here's why:
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| Miguel de Cervantes |
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Quixote & Panza looking for
Senoritas in distress
|
You've heard of the exploits of Don Quixote, the
near-sighted old dreamer who believed his mission in life was to rid the world of evil monsters
and save damsels in distress. But, of course no matter how well-intentioned he
was, things always found a way to go wrong. Like the time he
charged into a whirling windmill thinking it was a monster. Not a pretty sight.
That's me. Because whenever stuff “hits the fan",
it’s bound to be blowing in my direction.
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Coo-Bird: a Family's Treasure
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Tosti's, just before it was razed.
The feed mill is on the left. |
Whenever I run into customers of
Tosti’s Steak House, the restaurant that my wife Peggy and I operated from
1969-1984, it’s likely I’ll hear about a special memory they have hung onto. It
may have been a birthday party, or a New Year’s Eve gala, or one of our International
Gourmet Nights. Believe me, in 15 years there were many memorable events.
There were even a few love stories that germinated in the place; some ended in
marriage.
On the flip-side, there were a few relationships that
ended because of things that happened there. Maybe I’ll tell some of those
stories some day, but this is going to be about one of my favorite memories.
I’m telling you right up front that it’s a story about a pigeon, so if you’re
not into bird tales, you won't waste your time with the rest of this narrative.
Anyone who was around in those days surely remembers that
the place was next door to a feed mill and grain warehouse. With truckloads of grain
coming and going daily, some of the feed would inevitably spill onto the loading
docks, the roadway and parking area. The grain overflow created a great feeding
ground for a healthy and prodigious critter population, the most visible of
which were pigeons. They roosted under the eaves of both buildings and
pretty much ruled the air space for about a block in all directions. For
exercise, they would fly over to the Holiday Inn and (without checking in, of
course) would spend a lot of R&R time on the roof. As far as I could tell,
they didn’t go much farther than that so that when they got hungry their stash
would be nearby. Of course, in setting up housekeeping, they did what all of us
do when we settle down: they would bill and coo and the next thing you know they
would have parental responsibilities.
When I said that Peggy and I ran the restaurant, what I
meant was that she did the work and I did the glad-handing. If you’ve ever
started a business on a shoestring, you know that you do what you can to save
money; one of the ways we did that was to put Peg in charge of maintenance and
cleaning. Every morning, while I got my much-needed rest snug at home in bed,
she would go down to the to the place, swab the floors, put out the garbage,
clean the restrooms, and follow up on whatever I had left undone the night
before. Charley would go along with her and he would keep guard, so that no one
would try to sneak in while she was working. Charley had been a tiny puppy when
my son Gaetano brought him home as a birthday gift to me, telling everybody he
was a small terrier, which turned out to be a lie, but that’s another story that
I may tell later.
Before I go any further, I have to give you some
background about Peg and her mother, Eva. Otherwise, this story would seem like
I had made it up or something. Eva was born and raised in a small western
Wisconsin farm town near the Iowa border. Eva’s father, Doc Stanton, was the
veterinarian in the area, and Peg’s grandmother ran the local coffee shop where
they served breakfast, lunch and dinner. Some of the food they prepared had
been obtained as payment for Doc's services: fresh eggs, chickens, milk and even
some steaks, I guess. Eva’s love for animals grew out of Doc’s profession. She
was never without pets, usually several at one time. She told me about a pet
chicken she once had and she claimed it obeyed her better than any dog or cat
she ever had. Of course Eva passed the animal-loving gene down to my wife.
Peg-O-My-Heart has driven me to distraction with her affinity for animals more
than once. But that’s another story that I might get to at another time.
Peg’s father Fred had passed away, leaving Eva with an
empty nest back in Wisconsin after her youngest son got married. So Peg and I
asked Eva to come to live with us in Rome. She said she would come only if we
agreed she could keep her car and her pets. We caved on both points so I took
an airplane to O’Hare so I could drive her car back to Rome with her stuff as
well as her two cats and a dog. That trip could be a story in itself, but I’ll
save it for another time. After we got here, Eva settled in and helped with the
kids, did some cooking at home, and helped Peg on cleanup duty at the steak
house.
One morning as Peg went to unlock the back door of the
restaurant, she glanced down to see a shoebox with holes in the lid on the
doorstep. As usual, our dog Charley was with them. He stuck his nose under the
lid, obviously checking for a bomb or some other threat. But it wasn’t ticking,
so Charley nuzzled closer and lifted the top open with his nose. That’s when
they heard “Peep-peep, peep-peep” instead of tick-tick-tick. Charley jumped a
couple of feet in the air when he heard it and hid behind Peg, who went over and
found two naked baby pigeons, scared to death, no doubt, and surely hungry. I’m
certain that neighborhood kids had found the birds after they had fallen from
their nest and put them on the doorstep in the shoebox. I’ll never figure out
how they knew that Eva and Peg were such suckers for homeless creatures.
The cleaning chores suffered that day because Peg and her
mom rushed to a drugstore to buy eyedroppers and bread and milk. They had
become so involved in their latest animal rescue that I actually had to put out
the trash when I got to work later that day.
Of course, when I arose that same morning, I knew nothing
of the rescue mission. I poured my coffee and headed for the den to watch TV
news. As I did so, I noticed that the folding doors to the den were closed
tight with rubber bands holding them in place. As sharp as I am, I knew that
something was not right. Peg had been in the living room and must have heard my
chair move when I got up from the table because she ran in to tell me not to
open the doors. I looked down at the base of the doors and for the first time
noticed our four cats rubbing their back against the door with their tails
pointed at the ceiling. They looked at me as though they wanted me to move
faster to get the doors open.
“What the hell is going on?” I asked Peg.
Peg explained that we had visitors – a pair of hairless,
featherless baby pigeons – and that the cats probably hoped they were going to
be dinner guests. She told me how she and her mother had come upon the poor
abandoned creatures and had taken on the burden of raising them. I think you can understand that I was not happy and I
must have raised my voice when I demanded to know how long I would be deprived
of my favorite room in the house. “I don’t ask for much, you know,” I said
petulantly. Peg told me to lower my voice because she didn’t want her mother to
hear me. It would break Eva’s heart if she thought I didn’t want her pigeons
living with us.
I did better than lower my voice. I shut up completely
and observed for the next several days as Peg and her mother dipped bread in
honey and milk and shoved it into the beaks of those motherless little guys.
One of them, though, acted like he just didn’t want any part of this world. He
wouldn’t swallow no matter how much my ladies tried to coax him. They would
stroke his throat and beg him to go gulp, but it was no use. I concluded that
you can lead a pigeon to milk and honey, but …
Watching that little guy as he fought not to survive, I
developed a theory about how he and his brother had ended up on the doorstep. I
had been brushing up on psychology recently because it helped a lot on the
nights when I tended bar. I concluded that the baby birds hadn’t fallen out of
the nest, but had been kicked out by their mother. I could be wrong, but nobody
has put forth a better argument, and I tell you, I have a feel for these
things. I figured the one who wouldn’t eat had low self-esteem, and believed he
was worthless. He told himself that if his mother couldn’t love him, nobody
ever would. The other guy, I reckoned, was just plain stubborn and said to hell
with her (meaning their mother) and decided he wanted to grow up just to show
her.
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| Only one of the two was interested in survival |
There weren’t any drugs that treated depression for
pigeons in those days, and he was way too young for therapy, so the one who kept
his mouth shut at feeding time expired. Peg’s mom buried him in the box in
which he had been found and she cried a little. Not long, though, because she
had work to do to ensure that the other one didn’t decide to follow his brother
into the netherworld.
By this time, our daughter Ava had begun to take an
interest in the survivor and helped take care of him. Ava had inherited the
gene that afflicted Peg. Eva, our older daughter (she was named after her
grandmother) had the picked up a giant version and has had pets galore. That's one more story that I have to keep in mind for another time. (I have to give you a hint on this one, though. It's about a vicious goose she took into her home.)
Ava got to name the orphan and chose to call him Coo,
which I thought was very unimaginative, but everybody seemed to like it and so
that became his name. I was later able to give him a last name and he became
“Coo-Bird”.
As undernourished as he had been, Coo-Bird wasn’t out of
the woods health-wise. But my three ladies worked hard at feeding him and making
him feel wanted.
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| Coo biding his time on the fridge |
Coo first grew some feathers and then started to walk
around about a month after he had taken over my favorite room. Sometimes one of
the kids would forget to close the doors when they left the room and Coo would
wander out into the rest of the house. He was vaguely aware that the cats were
not his friends, but the term bird-brain didn’t come about without reason, so he
sometimes pigeon-toed it into a room where cats were hanging out, just waiting
for something interesting to come along. Charley, who had been the first to
sniff out the birds, no doubt felt paternal toward Coo and often came to his
rescue by getting between the bird and the cats. He held the felines – who were
also his friends – at bay by barking them off.
I had anticipated that an insurmountable problem would
arise with the cats as soon as Coo-Bird started to fly. But of course, I
totally underestimated Peggy June’s genius for engineering solutions. At the
first sign of Coo’s wing-flapping, Peg scoured the basement and came up with
four old Easter baskets and hung them from the ceilings of the downstairs
rooms. Then she picked Coo up and introduced him to each one of the baskets,
demonstrating to him that they were his safety nets. It worked great. Whenever
one of the cats got an idea about enhancing the menu, Coo would bat his wings
and land in one of the baskets, leaving a frustrated cat or two and pawing at
the air. He also found a sanctuary on his own. If the refrigerator was closer than one of the baskets, it also provided a safe haven.
As summer came on, I began
to worry about Coo-Bird's physical development. By this time he should have been
full-grown, but it became obvious that he was never going to be as big as his
cousins who lived down at the steak house. It didn’t seem to bother him,
though, as he appeared not to be very interested in flying. I guess having been
raised with the cats and dog, he thought he was a land animal. When he did lift
off, it was usually to get to safety in one of the baskets, or to jump onto our
heads, or sometimes he headed for the top of the refrigerator. We figured that
was his way of saying thank-you because if we gave him a cracker, or filled his
feed bowl he would end up in our hair. Charley often had Coo either on is head
or riding his back, especially if he had just barked a cat away.
Coo-Bird began taking strolls around the neighborhood. We
live on a small dead-end street and almost everybody got to know him and look
out for him. Once in a while he would take flight, but never very high, and
only for a short distance. Usually he just strutted up and down the street,
bobbing his head in time with his coo-coos.
Probably because of the insecurity he felt as a
hatchling, Coo did not like being alone, so when Peg and her mother were on
their restaurant cleanup assignment, he usually wandered into the bedroom and
tried to wake me by singing his awful song. I guess he thought it was a nice
song, but it was really pretty boring.
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| Ava giving Coo a ride upstairs
|
One Sunday morning, I was pretty
tired and tried to ignore him by pulling the pillow around my ears. He must
have lost patience with me when I ignored him for several minutes. His solution
was to hop onto the bed where he bit my exposed big toe, thinking, no doubt,
that would do the trick. He had never done that before, and I let out a howl
that could be heard in Camden, I think. A couple of choice words flew from my
throat as I promised to end Coo’s life immediately. Coo didn’t seem to be
paying any attention to my threats and that just made me angrier and louder as I
continued to tell him he was doomed to a violent end. Ava was the only one home
at the time and she ran into the bedroom, gathered Coo-Bird up in her hands and
ran upstairs to her bedroom with him, without ever saying a word. Her glare at
me, however, is frozen in my memory for all time.
I didn’t have time for an apology because I had to go the
restaurant to open the bar. We were usually closed on Sunday, but during
football season I opened the bar so that the guys could come down and watch the
games. I would tend bar and put out some snacks and sometimes the register
would ring a nice tune. As soon as I opened the doors, I put a couple of pizzas
in the oven and we had a good crowd that day.
Between answering the phone, tending bar, and trying to
watch the games, I was pretty busy. My car, a 1974 Buick with a landau top, was parked on Front
St. where I could see its roof through the side window of the restaurant, directly across from the bar
station. I probably saw the pigeon perched on the roof of the car several times
before it struck me as unusual. Even though the local pigeon population was
pretty bold, I had never seen any of them on a car roof before. I can’t say
that I immediately figured out the problem, because I'm not that sharp. But the
more I looked at that bird, the more certain I was it was Coo-Bird, mostly
because of his size. I picked up the phone and called home. Peg answered and I
told her that I was sure that Coo had flown down to the restaurant and was
sitting on my car.
Peg said, no, he hadn’t flown down. She was using that voice that I knew too well. She was not happy with me. “Ava and I took him
down there in the car so that he could join his cousins.” She said Ava was
convinced that I meant what I had said about breaking his neck and that the poor
Ava would rather turn him loose than let me commit murder. Peg added that she
couldn’t convince Ava that I didn’t mean it because she had always had her own
doubts about my sanity. It became clear to me that I was being told that Coo was
on the loose and in danger all because of me. Peg said that poor Ava had a
tearful moment with Coo before she tossed him in the direction of the Holiday
Inn where several pigeons were roosting. Ava cried all the way home, I learned
later, but she was comforted by the fact that Coo had joined his own kind and
was safe from me. I told Peg that was ridiculous. Now Peg started to sob some
and said it was my fault. I told Peg I was going out to put the bird in the car
and before she hung up I think I heard her swear at me.
When I went outside, Coo appeared scared to death. He
seemed to recognize me and might even have been happy that I was there to rescue
him. The wind was blowing very hard and the configuration of the buildings
created a tunnel that enhanced the wind speed. Coo-Bird walked over toward me
and let me gently pick him up off the car roof. But when I opened the door to
put him inside I had to press him against my chest and he panicked and flew
straight up in the air and landed in my hair. I reached for him and I guess I
held on too tightly because he pecked at my hand and I was forced to let go. No
doubt he was now convinced that I meant what I had said earlier that morning.
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It was very windy and flying wasn’t Coo’s forte
|
Coo flew toward James St.,
no higher than about three feet. Every time he tried to elevate, the wind drove
him back down toward the pavement. Soon he was exhausted and landed on the
street. It was obvious he was trying to make it back to the Holiday Inn, but
remember, Coo’s main mode of transportation was walking, not flying. Traffic on
James St. was heavy and I was sure he would be squashed to death. On the street
at home, everybody knew Coo and had watched out for him and even stopped their
cars to let him cross. But here, these drivers had no idea who he was and
probably figured he was just another rat with wings.
What could I do? I did what any sane person would do. I
ran after him, and when I realized he was not going to let me pick him up, I
went out into traffic holding my hand out to stop the cars while Coo crossed the
street. It must have taken us ten minutes and looking back on it, I guess I’m
lucky nobody called a cop or an insane asylum. Here I was, all 270 pounds of
me, hair flying in the wind, shirt out of my pants, holding up my hand and
shouting for people to stop their cars so that a bird could walk across the
street. Not pretty, believe me.
Once he got to the parking lot, Coo decided to go for the
roof of the motel again. He was out of the wind tunnel and that made flying
easier. The wind did hold him up a bit, and he was pretty unsteady, but he got
up there and perched with a bunch of other guys, looking pathetically small. I
was certain that his cousins were edging away from him and saw no sign of a
welcoming greeting.
But, since I couldn’t fly at all, I could do no more. I
went back into the bar, called home and demanded that Peg drive down to take Coo
home. She said that she wasn’t going to do it, and I felt about as bad as I had
ever felt. I watched the rest of the football game and, of course, all my teams
had lost.
When I got home that night I learned that Peg, Eva and
Ava had gone to the Holiday Inn. Ava spotted her Coo-Bird and talked to him,
convincing him that he was better off at home. She held her hands out and
promised him that she would keep me under control. It probably was an easy
sell, because the last time I had seen Coo, he did not appear to be very happy.
He alit from the roof and landed gently in Ava’s hair and they all drove
home. I felt like I was as they told me all about getting Coo home, and I protested a lot about the glares I was getting. Ava eventually accepted my story, acknowledging
the fact that I had demonstrated a fondness for Coo-Bird by putting my own life
on the line to get him across the street safely.
As summer came on, I began to worry about Coo-Bird's
physical development. By this time he should have been full-grown, but it became
obvious that he was never going to be as big as his cousins who lived down at
the steak house. It didn’t seem to bother him, though, as he appeared not to be
very interested in flying. I guess having been raised with cats and a dog, he
thought he was a land animal. When he did lift off, it was to get to
safety in one of the baskets or the refrigerator. He also had this habit of flying into our heads and that puzzled us at first. After comparing notes, we decided that it was Coo's way of saying thank-you because if we gave him a cracker, or filled his feed bowl he would end
up in our hair. Charley often had Coo either on is head or riding his back,
especially if he had just barked a cat away.
With the good weather, Coo-Bird began taking strolls around the neighborhood. We
live on a small dead-end street and almost everybody got to know him and look
out for him. Once in a while he would take flight, but never very high, and
only for a short distance. Usually he just strutted up and down the street,
bobbing his head in time with his coo-coos.
There was one time, though, that I thought we were going
to have a serious problem. We watched from the picture window as Coo-Bird
headed across the street where a visitor was sitting alone on a neighbor’s
porch. She didn’t know Coo and we could see she was eying him suspiciously.
I’m sure she had never seen a pigeon that did nothing but walk. He went right
up to the porch, showing no fear, and sang his monotonous song, timing his coos
with his head thrusts. I guess the lady figured he was hungry because she went
into the house, telling him not to go away, and she came back with a slice of
bread which she tore into little pieces and tossed in his direction. Coo
stuffed himself with the free meal and when he was done, he thanked her by
elevating and landing in her hair, which was abundant. This sudden move was not
expected and the panic on her face was almost too much to bear. I nearly had a
heart attack of my own just picturing the ambulance guys asking what happened to
the lady who was sprawled out on the lawn with her hair all tangled up. Worst
case scenario, I thought she might survive and sue us for all we were worth –
not much, mind you, but I didn’t want to end up panhandling for meals like Coo
had just done.
Unlike me, Ava was not frozen in a panic and she ran across the
street, calmed the lady and told Coo to come to her. Coo obeyed and perched on
Ava’s shoulder, and while Ava explained Coo’s eccentricities to the lady, she
checked the victim for serious injury and found none. Since neighbor’s guest didn’t run into the house to call a lawyer, I relaxed a
little.
Coo-Bird continued to make his rounds of the neighborhood without an escort and because everybody looked out for him, we weren't very concerned about his safety. Neighbors welcomed his visits, and usually provided a treat for him. They also made sure that their own pets did him no harm.
It wasn’t
unusual for him to be gone from the house for a few hours at a time, so when he
didn’t show for supper one day, we weren’t too concerned. However, when it began to get dark, we began to worry.
Ava went out and called to him but she got no response. Peg and Eva took the
car and drove around calling his name, but Coo didn't answer and there was no
sign of him. We went to bed that night thinking maybe he had become lonely for
his cousins and gone to visit them, hoping they would give him a nicer
homecoming this time. At least that's what we told ourselves.
But, our hopes were dashed when Bruce, the policeman who
lived across the street on the front door the next day and told us he had bad
news. Bruce said his wife had seen Coo-Bird earlier in the day, strolling down
the road as he usually did, when a truck turned the corner at a fairly high rate
of speed. It was a delivery truck, he said, possibly UPS, but his wife was not
sure. His wife had told him about the accident when he had come from lunch. He
figured the driver had not made deliveries on the street before and must have assumed that Coo would fly out
of his way. He guessed that because everybody in the neighborhood had looked
out for Coo, the bird’s brain wasn’t on alert for dangerous vehicles. He said
his wife told him that Coo suddenly realized he had a problem and tried to fly,
but it was too late.
Bruce said his wife was sure that Coo didn’t suffer, and
that he had himself had gone out and taken care of what was left. Bruce had
provided him respectable burial to save us the emotional trauma. We thanked
Bruce for his concern.
We tried to hold a vigil in the living room after Bruce
left, but it was very brief. Peg and Grandma excused themselves and went
upstairs to one of the bedrooms, to have a good cry, I’m sure. Ava’s tears were
streaming down her face, and she glanced over at me to see if I had the
appropriate reaction. The tear that was making its way down my face must have
satisfied her and she quickly went out the front door, probably to commiserate
with a friend or two.
Within a month or two, we were able to hold real mourning
session, retelling our own favorite stories about our rare bird. I’m sure the
neighbors have some stories of their own that they share with their own
relatives and friends. And I know the gang that was at the bar on the day I
saved Coo’s life have retold that one a few times.
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