thehypocrite

I was a little boy when my dad brought home the ducklings—five little yellow fur balls. They were wonderful. Sweetness incarnate.

I don’t remember when he built the pen at the back of our yard in that little industrial neighborhood. It was well-made with chicken wire and 2x4s caging our new pets. There is a garage now where this pen once existed, beneath a fruit-bearing mulberry tree. The ducks LOVED that tree every spring. Five yellow furry August Gloops with bills. The abundant berries turned the cage in to an organic Jackson Pollock painting.

It didn’t occur to me then that the cage was not just keeping our little friends in; it was keeping a dangerous world out. We never did (and even now rarely do) think about our own lives like that—with the protective walls and limits. We only ever saw the barriers, never what those walls were keeping at bay. What mental construct makes every living thing believe that the grass is always greener?

Existentialism aside, the pen did stink.

Our favorite thing was to get our ducks out and pet them—usually until we got pooped on. As they grew older, the appeal lessened. Wild animals are never much fun to domesticate, and with experience, our cute ducklings developed defensive, even aggressive, natures. When they bit, we knew they meant business, and it was time to put them back where we found them. It scared me and my sisters.
While they were still ducklings, one died. I did not know why. These things, I suppose, are just part of animal life. We just found him one morning in the corner of the pen, all by himself. His brothers and sisters were oblivious to the tragedy of his lifeless and still body. I was broken by the loss. Having four other ducks to play with was meaningless. I don’t recall if that duck was specifically special to me or if it was my first experience with death. I still feel the hurt and the loss though.

“Bury him,” my dad said when I told him what I’d found.

So I dug through my meager possessions for a proper casket for the little lifeless body. Eventually, I found the perfect little cardboard box that housed some knick-knack or another.

I lay his tiny furry body in the box as gently as I could. The box was the perfect choice as it fit his little duckling-ness as if it was made for it. Then I looked for a place to inter the little coffin, settling on the disregarded flower bed outside our dining room window.
It was late morning when I finally gathered the shovel and started digging out one, then two... then a third shovel-full so that our dog (Pokey) wouldn’t find and dig up the grave. She was the digging-est dog I ever saw.

I conducted my little makeshift funeral without fanfare and tearfully covered the little hole. Death is sad even when it’s just some dumb old duckling.

That night at a dinner of fried chicken and green beans, I could see the fresh mound of dirt through a dining room window large enough that you could look out on the whole yard and street.

As the days went by, my sadness lessened, and each night the little mound grew smaller and less noticeable until a few weeks later, I couldn’t even tell where the little thing was buried.

Over time my sadness drifted into curiosity as to what became of the little body. Did he look the same there in his little box? Was he bones now? Or dust? I could not get it out of my mind. How long before his little self just became dirt again?

So, after about a month of wondering, I took my shovel and started stabbing around, now having become some kind of morbid scientist-child. Or grave-robber.
I found the box, cardboard still intact. As I removed it from the hole and opened the lid, I discovered a partially mummified baby duck corpse. It was awful. Today, 45 years later, I have zero interest in dead bodies. Duck or otherwise.

After a couple of years, the ducks lost all their novelty. They were a mess to clean up after, hard to keep fed and watered in the winter months and like most new things, we kids no longer found them fun to play with once the new wore off.

So it was that my dad decided we would set them free at a local park. There is a very large and quite pretty park in my hometown with a grove around a pond named, accurately enough, Duck Pond. My dad used to take us there to play on the swing set and we would always end up at the pond to marvel at the water fowl. A lot of pointing and smiling and trying to catch the odd creatures. It is probably where we got the idea to get ducks.

Even though we'd grown bored with our pets, the idea of them going away was not something we children embraced. Our four big fat ducks were family and no one likes it when someone leaves home. Especially small children.

“I tell you what,” my dad said to us. “We'll tie a red piece of yarn around each of their necks and then when we got to the pond, we can see our ducks as they live with the other fowl.”

That sounded GRAND. We weren't getting rid of them, just giving them a bigger home.

Of course, no practice, holding a juvenile duck and tying a string around it's neck is a lot harder than it sounds. And we weren't big enough to be much help. I don't recall my father being frustrated or angry at the process (I hardly remember it at all), but this is exactly the kind of scenario I recall would make him frustrated and then angry. But I also remember him musing a lot when we got scared of silly harmless things like angry ducks. So, I choose to recall him as smiling and giggling a lot when we saw the ducks snap at us with their toothless bills.

And the release was a joyous affair as I recall. Setting them free was exciting. They had lived their young lives in a pen with a water pail and the occasional wading pool. Now, they had an ENTIRE POND and a bigger family with which to frolic!

We got ice cream after. What a wonderful summer day that was.

By fall, the yarn had fallen from the necks of our four ducks. For a time, we thought we could still spot them. The black duck had a tuft of white on its tail and one of the other 3 had black wing tips on its white body. But then we weren't sure anymore and we grew sad that we were forgetting them. But, it was 'okay' dad said because the ducks would remember us and when we fed them bread crumbs, we knew they would come say hi even though none of us had any idea which ducks had been ours.

Then they were gone. It was my first understanding that migration meant to leave a place. Their wild instincts had overcome their civilized desire to stay and socialize these three young children who had loved them, forgotten them and then loved them again.

Pets do a good job of introducing joy, happiness and even some sadness into our young lives. Life’s lesson's for children are always a surprise and sometimes hard to learn. But, one way or another, this life is going to send us to school. I'm glad it was something I learned from my 5 little furry friends.

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One MUST read the classics. They are denser and more challenging, but that is the point.
Someone sat and thought for a long time once. Then they wrote a book about their experiences and thoughts. And we call those books the classics.
Then, someone read the classics, they wrote essays and perhaps books about what they read. But those were muddy and overly verbose observations not about their own experiences and thoughts but about what they observer perceived to the original authors intent.
Then someone read those derivatives and wrote books and essays about those books and essays. Then someone read those, but now they made a movie about them. Then someone saw that movie and read the derivations and they made movie. Then someone saw that movie and made a movie. Then someone saw that movie and made a movie, for Netflix.
And so we find ourselves at a culturally bankrupt point in history where there are no longer good original ideas only replicas of replicas.
So, one must do TWO things:
1. Sit and think
2. Read the classics
I'll add a third:
3. HAVE experiences and write about them. This should be number 1.

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I may have a mental illness.

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There is a light in the world
To which most are blind
It’s brilliance warm,
Golden, happy.

The shutters of fear
Prevent most from feeling
The satisfying richness
It provides to all mankind

Open the eyes of the heart
And let it chase away
The shadows and
The weight of existence

Let it teach you to float

Thanks for reading and sharing my beautiful lie.

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