hobbythat required safaris to neighboring towns.
I didn’t love my fish, but I loved the idea of having them. They were a logical extension to pawing copies of
National Geographic
and naively mooning over exotic alternatives to life in a bland suburban neighborhood that was more in line with
Reader’s Digest
. To my parents’ horror, my bedroom hobby expanded to fill several tanks, including a fifty-five-gallon aquarium whose water, salt, substrate, rocks, filters, pumps, and lights weighed over six hundred pounds and eventually cracked the ceiling plaster of the living room below.
Down the hall from my oceanarium was a second-story walk-out porch my family called the airing deck. My parents had replaced the original tar-paper surface with a flooring of loose, crushed white stone. Because this material reminded me of the bottom of my tanks, or because I was addled by a mixture of hormones and self-absorption, I decided that the porch made a convenient dumping ground for dirty aquarium gravel and the expended contents of aquarium filters. Leaves, seedpods, twigs, and sparrow droppings fallen from the huge maple that overhung the airing deck disguised my lazy landfill for several months. By the time my crime came to light, the organic medium had nurtured the growth of a tenacious layer of moss that no amount of bleach or careful harvesting could remove.
“Did I tell you about the Taylors’ French lop bunny, Bea?” Linda asked, as I chopped up a brussels sprout with my fork and tried to get Stanley to accept a bite.
“Whatever her problem is, we can’t take her,” I proclaimed, fully realizing that the firm line I was drawing could easily be erased. I was far more comfortable falling guilelessly into events rather than making decisions. I would endlessly second-guess my decisions if things went well, or blame myself if things went wrong. Letting circumstances wash over me was the way I navigated through life. Itwas how I had acquired a steady freelance writing job, how I had blundered into co-owning a typesetting business a decade earlier, and how I had acquired a column in a national music magazine. I was lucky that nothing dark and sinister had ever presented itself to me with each nut and bolt perfectly aligned to the mushy contours of my weak will, or I might have absorbed a felony just as I had absorbed reef fish, invertebrates, rabbits, a canary, a cat, two parrots, and three parakeets.
Linda must have recognized my attempted resolve by the quaver in my voice, because no rabbit named Bea or any other orphans directly followed. There were better ways of slipping animals into the house.
O N OUR THIRD wedding anniversary, Linda presented me with a large package whose festive, hole-punched wrapping paper concealed a cage.
“Oh, my gosh, another bird!” I said with a big smile on my face.
“It’s a dove,” Linda told me.
“Aw, you shouldn’t have,” I insisted, my smile still frozen in place. “I mean it, you really shouldn’t have.” But even I wasn’t enough of a curmudgeon to object to a gift that my wife had carefully framed as an expression of love. Howard, for his part, refused to toe the line as a symbol of peace, opting instead to perpetuate interspecies incompatibility.
Most commonly called a ring-neck dove (but also referred to as a barbary dove, collared dove, or turtle dove), Howard was a fawn-colored, mourning dove–size bird with a thin black ring around the back of his neck. An apricot-colored eye with a large black iris gave him a demeanor of perpetual surprise. His straight yellow toothpick of a beak originated just in front of his eye, suggesting an artist’s drunken slip of the hand while painting the upper mandible. Though he was handsome enough while standing still,the darting of his tiny head while the bulk of his body remained motionless gave Howard the air of a clown. His feet seemed borrowed from another species. In contrast to the velvety surface of his feathers, which
I didn’t love my fish, but I loved the idea of having them. They were a logical extension to pawing copies of
National Geographic
and naively mooning over exotic alternatives to life in a bland suburban neighborhood that was more in line with
Reader’s Digest
. To my parents’ horror, my bedroom hobby expanded to fill several tanks, including a fifty-five-gallon aquarium whose water, salt, substrate, rocks, filters, pumps, and lights weighed over six hundred pounds and eventually cracked the ceiling plaster of the living room below.
Down the hall from my oceanarium was a second-story walk-out porch my family called the airing deck. My parents had replaced the original tar-paper surface with a flooring of loose, crushed white stone. Because this material reminded me of the bottom of my tanks, or because I was addled by a mixture of hormones and self-absorption, I decided that the porch made a convenient dumping ground for dirty aquarium gravel and the expended contents of aquarium filters. Leaves, seedpods, twigs, and sparrow droppings fallen from the huge maple that overhung the airing deck disguised my lazy landfill for several months. By the time my crime came to light, the organic medium had nurtured the growth of a tenacious layer of moss that no amount of bleach or careful harvesting could remove.
“Did I tell you about the Taylors’ French lop bunny, Bea?” Linda asked, as I chopped up a brussels sprout with my fork and tried to get Stanley to accept a bite.
“Whatever her problem is, we can’t take her,” I proclaimed, fully realizing that the firm line I was drawing could easily be erased. I was far more comfortable falling guilelessly into events rather than making decisions. I would endlessly second-guess my decisions if things went well, or blame myself if things went wrong. Letting circumstances wash over me was the way I navigated through life. Itwas how I had acquired a steady freelance writing job, how I had blundered into co-owning a typesetting business a decade earlier, and how I had acquired a column in a national music magazine. I was lucky that nothing dark and sinister had ever presented itself to me with each nut and bolt perfectly aligned to the mushy contours of my weak will, or I might have absorbed a felony just as I had absorbed reef fish, invertebrates, rabbits, a canary, a cat, two parrots, and three parakeets.
Linda must have recognized my attempted resolve by the quaver in my voice, because no rabbit named Bea or any other orphans directly followed. There were better ways of slipping animals into the house.
O N OUR THIRD wedding anniversary, Linda presented me with a large package whose festive, hole-punched wrapping paper concealed a cage.
“Oh, my gosh, another bird!” I said with a big smile on my face.
“It’s a dove,” Linda told me.
“Aw, you shouldn’t have,” I insisted, my smile still frozen in place. “I mean it, you really shouldn’t have.” But even I wasn’t enough of a curmudgeon to object to a gift that my wife had carefully framed as an expression of love. Howard, for his part, refused to toe the line as a symbol of peace, opting instead to perpetuate interspecies incompatibility.
Most commonly called a ring-neck dove (but also referred to as a barbary dove, collared dove, or turtle dove), Howard was a fawn-colored, mourning dove–size bird with a thin black ring around the back of his neck. An apricot-colored eye with a large black iris gave him a demeanor of perpetual surprise. His straight yellow toothpick of a beak originated just in front of his eye, suggesting an artist’s drunken slip of the hand while painting the upper mandible. Though he was handsome enough while standing still,the darting of his tiny head while the bulk of his body remained motionless gave Howard the air of a clown. His feet seemed borrowed from another species. In contrast to the velvety surface of his feathers, which
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