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Journal of a Sabbatical |
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June 21, 2000 |
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@#$%!!!! |
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Adopt Cats Please: Merrimack River Feline Rescue Society
Today's Bird Sightings: Today's Reading: Summer: From the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau edited by H.G.O. Blake, Hokkaido Highway Blues by Will Ferguson, The Herring Gull's World by Niko Tinbergen Today's Starting Pitcher: 2000
Book List
Copyright © 2000, Janet I. Egan |
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@#$%!!!!! is about all I can think of to say. A note by the sink, everybody's greeting to me in the same breath as hello: call M________ at Brigham ASAP. So I'm thinking: Oh God, did Buddy bite somebody? Or (given my recent experience with my own Wilbur) did something bite Buddy? No. Buddy's fine. He didn't do anything wrong. New residents have moved in and are allergic to cats. Buddy must go. Today. Today? M__________ insists she has been calling for 2 weeks and has not been able to reach anyone. Strange that we have never had a voice mail message from her. Anyway, negotiations ensue and I am assured by M_______ that a niece of Mrs. L will adopt Buddy when she gets back from Florida and that I only have to find a place for Buddy 'til Sunday. Stacy to the rescue gets Claire and George (nice people who have a cat boarding business) to foster Buddy until said niece returns. I agree to pick up Buddy at noon at Brigham and drive him over to Claire & George's place in the wilds of Merrimac. With that figured out, I set to washing dishes with a vengeance. With great ferocity. Conversation centers around piping plovers rather than Buddy. Bob, who's doing his second year of the plover warden thing, just saw his first piping plovers, a pair at the north end of the beach. He was all excited to finally see them. Then we talk about the cretins who smashed a piping plover nest in Rhode Island and the idiot who shot a snowy owl on the Cape. People are so strange. Anyway, the hour comes round and I go to Brigham to get Buddy. M_______ gives me this long involved story about how she has been calling for 3 weeks ... Mrs. L tears up when I put Buddy in the carrier. Her roommate isn't too happy either. M_______ continues to tell me more and more bizarre things. I am getting the feeling she just wants Buddy out of there. The carrier is a little banged up and the door doesn't close right so I have a little trouble getting him settled. I feel like the villain of the piece, the bad guy. I try to assure Mrs. L that Buddy will be well-looked after at Claire and George's and there will be no problem with her niece adopting him. I leave with Buddy. Outside I wave feebly as Mrs. L watches me load Buddy into the car and start it up. I drive to the wilds of Merrimac in a mental haze. Boy, folks weren't kidding when they said it's a long drive. Merrimac must be big area-wise 'cause it's only the next town plus one from Salisbury (Salisbury, Amesbury, Merrimac - can't be that long a drive, ha!). Buddy whimpers at me but doesn't really meow. At our destination he won't come out of the carrier. He looks at me like I am some kind of villain. I don't know what to do next. I'm numb. I finally get some lunch, which does not cheer me up that much, and drive to Newburyport again for some Fowle's coffee because I have none left at home. I get a parking space right in front of Fowle's. Obviously instant karma has not caught up with me yet. It occurs to me that if I want to get a cup of coffee to go as well as the half pound of French Roast I've come for, that might preclude a used book browse so I cross the street to Olde Port Book Shop. I browse with the same intensity I used on the dishes. There's lots of new stuff in the local history section but nothing that my Merrimack River collection needs. Downstairs, I find new stuff in the bird section too. Penguin Summer by Eleanor Rice Pettingill practically leaps off the shelf at me. It's a book about studying penguins in the Falklands that I've heard of and seen referenced in bibliographies but never read. I browse it heavily and decide I can't live without it today. Then I spot The Herring Gull's World by Niko Tinbergen. I've wanted that for awhile and the only copy Olde Port had previously gotten in was a paperback that I was so allergic to I couldn't read it. This however, is a nice hardcover edition with a modernistic painting of a herring gull on the dust jacket. I read the first 10 pages immediately and add it to my shopping cart (metaphorically - in actual reality one could not get a shopping cart down those stairs or back up them). I walk around with both books clutched in my sweaty little hand. Fortunately the dust jackets are brodarted (covered in some kind of plastic) so sweating on them doesn't damage them. Domino does not even look up at me from her cozy cat bed in the corner by the children's books. What, are all black and white cats going to hate me now? So armed with two new antiquated books, I get the coffee - some to brew at home and a large dark roast of the day black to drink right now. I think about going back to the cat shelter to take pictures of the new cats, but I'm just not up for it. The coffee perks me up a little so I go to look for birds. The wind is blowing fiercely out of the southwest. I'm standing on the Hellcat dike looking at two terns who look like Forster's terns but I can't keep my binoculars steady in this wind. I go back and forth on the identification and finally decide I can go ahead and list them. No sign of the gull-billed tern that's written on the whiteboard though. I hear a willet behind me. Turning I see the strangest bird behavior I've ever seen -yes, stranger than the Bonaparte's gull who thinks he is a semipalmated sandpiper. Four redwinged blackbirds and two willets are mobbing a crow. Willets mobbing a crow? Since when? And since when do they cooperate with blackbirds? I've seen mixed flocks of blackbirds go after crows, but never seen a willet do that. It's one thing to be pummeled by blackbirds, but that willet's gotta hurt! It's almost bigger than the crow and with that shorebird bill! Ouch. Too windy to take pictures of wildflowers, which I'd hoped to do. The grasses and flowers are moving like heavy surf. Purple loosetrife is starting to bloom. Pestilence is abroad in the marsh. Back home I curl up with Hokkaido Highway Blues and pretend I am in Japan chasing cherry blossoms. Definitely plotting my escape. |
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