The Doves

When I was little, (don’t ask how little because I am not sure, let’s just say somewhere around ten years old or so,) I found a dove that had an encounter with the business end of a peashooter. He didn’t look that bad off, but he was definitely not feeling well, so I picked him up and took him home.

When I got home I showed the dove to the one person I knew who could fix anything, my father. He checked the dove over, and told me that the he had indeed taken a hit to the head and was a little disoriented but that he should be fine. He said it was probably because of the head injury that the dove couldn’t fly, and that it may or may not fly again soon, and that either way it was up to us to keep him safe and comfortable.

My dad is an engineer, and can design and build ANYTHING at the drop of a hat. He took off his sports coat, lead me and my new friend out to the garage, and in the time it took most fathers to crack a beer and scratch their ass he had built a makeshift birdcage out of an old orange crate he had been using to hold some even older electrical parts. He did a good job too. He covered the front with chicken wire, and cut a large hole in the back of the crate, which he covered with a door that slid up and down. He cut smaller holes in each side, and pushed a piece of dowel through it so the bird had a place to perch. He then affixed an eyebolt to the top of the new cage, and we hung it off of an eve of his greenhouse. It was amazing.

That weekend my father built the most awesome birdcage for my dove. It measured probably two and a half to three feet deep by maybe four feet long and three feet high. It had a pitched roof with chicken wire around three sides and the back covered by wood. The floor was ¼ inch mesh wire, and it had three dowels for perches. It was a dove mansion. I thought my dove might be lonely, so I bought two more to keep him company from a local feed and seed store. They all got along swimmingly. They got along so well they even had eggs!

When the first clutch was laid, my dad modified the cage by adding a nesting box to the back. It was of the same design as the door on the first cage; the nesting box slid on the back of the cage over a large hole big enough for the doves to enter. We provided nesting material, and moved the clutch of eggs into the box.

Unfortunately, the first bunch of eggs died, but there were others and the survival rate must have been about 90%. Soon I was in the dove business. When the baby’s grew into young birds old enough to leave the nest, I took them to the feed-and-seed and sold them for a buck. I can’t remember how long we had the birds, but it was at least a few years. I remember the cooing noise they would make in the morning, and the weird weeds that would grow under their cage from the birdseed. (I later discovered that there was a low-grade variety of hemp that grew out of that birdfeed mix. My first marijuana crop!)

The old greenhouse is long gone, as are the cage and the doves, but fond memories remain with me of the compassion my father showed for those birds, and the love he demonstrated for his son by being late for his job because he had to build a bird cage for a injured dove his kid found.

Meet Thalia

After my favorite cat Athena died while I was in the hospital last year, I decided I didn’t want another cat. I was quite upset that she had died, and getting another cat just seemed wrong at the time. Well, while wallowing in some particularly bitter self-pity one evening, I saw an ad in our local paper for Siamese kittens, and I am not sure what came over me but I called.

The breeder told me the four she had listed in the paper were all sold, but that if I was interested there were two Blue Point kittens that would be available in November. If I liked one, she would hold it for me until then. Having been cleared for short car trips by my doctor the week before, my wife and I went to see them the next day.

The breeder led us up to the room where the kittens were being kept with their mother, and as soon as we entered, both kittens scurried under the bed. I was able to catch one by hiding on the top of the bed while the breeder chased it out from underneath. I gently lifted the kitten up, and she looked calm at first but when I put her down on the mattress, she looked at me and hissed. I picked her up to see if she might warm up to me a bit, but again she looked at me and hissed. By now the breeder had corralled the other kitten, and handed her to me saying something about how perhaps this one will be a little friendlier. She was. I chose her, the breeder tied a blue string around her neck to identify her as mine, and wrote out the contract.

On the way home my wife asked me what I would name her, and I said I would need to think about it. Before too long I decided to name her after another Greek goddess, just as I had with Athena. I looked through a few sites on the Internet, and found the name “Thalia”, and just like Athena, she has grown into her name.

I picked up Thalia about three weeks later, and she has become the comedienne of the house. Being Siamese, she is ready to kick-ass at the drop of a dime. She even stands her ground against Angel, who outweighs her by nearly 12 pounds. Even when she was very little, maybe just two pounds, she would wrestle with him on the bed. She is lightning fast, has the grace of a ballerina, and the agility of an acrobat. She can leap at least six feet, often landing on my back or shoulders, and can climb up most any object in the house.

Have You Philately?

I live within blocks of where I grew up. I have, in fact, lived in the same small California town for most of my life. In 1967, when I was six years old, my parents moved our family into the house where they still live today. Since then the only time I lived elsewhere was for a short while in the early 1990's when I moved to San Diego. But I moved back to Ventura in 1994, got married in 2000, and now own a condominium that was built when I was fifteen on the site of an avocado orchard I played in when I was ten.

There is a riverbed near where we live that, unlike most everything else in town, has changed very little over the past thirty-four years. Running from the foothills to the ocean, the river “bottom”, as it has become locally known, is little more than a trickle of water for most of the year transforming via the winter storms into a full-fledged raging torrent.

In the early 1970’s, the river bottom was the perfect place for my brother and I to look for high adventure, and when school let out for the summer we would easily spend an entire day there catching lizards, small fish, and frogs. But the real allure of the river bottom, at least for me, was its banks.

Before even more condominiums were built along reclaimed land along the river’s banks, there were a number of old trash dumps that the city never bothered to clean up. In these dumps was everything imaginable from old bicycles, car parts, broken toilets, and magazines, to just plain old trash. It was a young boy's treasure trove. There were at least three separate dumps that spanned some three decades of our town’s history. Even as kids we were able to discern this fact from our many archeological expeditions to these sites. There were plenty of discarded magazines, letters, and newspapers among the layers of refuse that made it rather obvious even to the least experienced adventurer when in history these artifacts were deposited.

I credit my brother for actually turning these otherwise forgotten city dump sites into a real treasure hunt because he was the one who saw the value of the many discarded envelopes and letters we found there. My brother collected many of the used envelopes, and carefully cut around the stamps, and then floated the stamp still attached to a portion of the envelope in hot water. The hot water would separate the stamp from the paper, and this was how my brother built quite an impressive stamp collection.

Because I wanted to do most of the same things as my older brother, I started my own little stamp collection. My brother gave me all of his duplicate stamps, and from what he gave me plus what I gleaned from the dumps on my own; I built a nice little collection myself. Once we exhausted the supply at the dumps we started buying stamps from local hobby stores. We extended our individual collections to include foreign stamps, and we would send off for a “grab bag” of 1000 guaranteed no-two-alike stamps from ads we found in comic books. We became quite serious about the whole stamp collecting pastime; looking for stamps with little or no postmark, placing each stamp in a special made sleeve with and adhesive backing made for stamp collecting books, and competing with each other over the greatest number, and best quality stamps. His was always the best.

I still have my collection, and I recently found my brother’s. He lives in another state now, so I called him and told him I had it, and would be sending it off to him soon. While we never found an “Inverted Jenny”, or any other extremely rare specimen, those stamps still have great value for me, and I am glad we rediscovered them. When I called my brother and told him I would be sending his collection to him, it sparked a wonderful conversation for a couple of hours about not only the old town dumps, but also about our many adventures down in the old river bottom as well.

Subservient Chicken

If your idea of fun is forcing some poor soul in a chicken suit to obey your every command, then the subservient chicken is for you. But be forwarned, you could just end up spending the rest of your day there.

Happy Birthday Mama

The Story of Angel

My wife and I love our pets. To date our household includes two dogs, three cats, and a turtle. When we married she brought with her three kids, one cat and a dog. The dog, Mariah, belongs to her oldest boy, Rodrigo. The cat, Salem, belongs to her daughter, Jazmine. What follows is the story of how we brought my wife’s dog, Angel into our lives.

There is a small tourist stop along the 101 highway in California near Carpinteria known as Santa Clause Lane. In 2001, the most recognizable icon of that nifty little beach town, a large statue of Santa himself, was removed from the top of the building of which he had been perched after more than fifty years. Having lived in the area since 1965 or so, I told my wife that before they did topple Santa, I would like to go down and take a few pictures of him.

It was a drizzly day just four days after Christmas, and my wife was not in the happiest of moods, but she agreed to go nonetheless. On the way there my wife once again brought up the idea of adopting a small lap dog. This topic usually came up whenever she was feeling a little down, and I always tried to be positive about the idea even though I really didn’t want to share my home with a yappy, jealous little dog. Even still, seeing that my wife was not feeling all that chipper, I told her that after I took the pictures we would call a couple of pet stores in the area and see if they had the breed she was looking for.

Her first choice had been a toy variety of the poodle breed called a “teacup” poodle. So named because of their diminutive size. After much consideration and research, my wife decided that a Maltese would be more to her liking. She wanted a small dog she could take with her whenever she wanted, but she also wanted one that was well behaved, full of love, and of course very cute. She found during her research that Maltese generally meet these criteria. I called a number of pet stores in Carpinteria and Santa Barbara, but none had any Maltese pups available. I told my wife that we could go and look at the puppies anyway, but she declined. She wanted to see a Maltese, and that was all she was interested in. So we started to drive home.

As we headed north on 101 I remembered that there was a pet store in a mall in Thousand Oaks, and so I suggested that we go look at the puppies there. I told her rather than calling, lets go for the drive, go in and look, and maybe get a little something to eat since it was getting late. She acquiesced.

Now, my idea had always been to be positive about the idea of a little dog because I figured my wife would eventually come to the same conclusion that I had, which was that a dog would just be impractical for us at this point in our married life. I also thought that even if we DID find a Maltese at a pet store, which I believed to be highly unlikely, and even if my wife DID fall in love with one, I would be able to talk some sense into her and avoid buying one.

How wrong I can be.

By the time we got to the mall, my wife’s mood had brightened considerably. I am not sure how or why, and you could’ve asked her at the time and I am sure she wouldn’t have been able to tell you why either, but she really was much happier than when we were in Carpinteria. We drove to Thousand Oaks, and made a beeline to the pet store on the second floor. My wife headed straight to the back of the store where they kept the puppies, and there, in a small glass booth intended to seclude you and a small furry mammal for the purpose of causing you to bond, fall in love with, and buy said furry mammal, was a lady holding the cutest Maltese pup you have ever seen. My wife pressed herself up against that glass booth like a lizard in a jar, and then turned to me and said, “There she is!” As she said this I saw cartoon bags with dollar signs and wings flying out of the window of my mind.

My wife’s enthusiasm was not lost on the woman in the booth, nor on the surrounding crowd of shoppers and salespeople, and when she emerged from the booth the lady asked my wife if she would like to hold “him”. Of course my wife was delighted, and held the little fluffy powder puff close to her heart with her head against his. She then held him up, looked at him, and said in almost baby talk, “You were supposed to be a girl, but you’re a boy!” Again, this was exclaimed in front of a crowd of people including the sales people and the lady who had just been looking at the puppy first. My wife, realizing that the woman was considering buying the pup turned to her and said, “Oh, I’m sorry. Are you going to buy him?” The lady, who obviously could tell love at first sight when she saw it said, “Well, he is going to be bigger than I would like. I have two females at home, and wanted a male to breed with them, but they are small, and he will be a little too big. Besides, you deserve him.” With that, the lady turned to the sales person who still had the contract in his hand and said, “I don’t think I want to buy him after all.”
To the sales person’s credit, he said with a smile that it was no problem, and left to re-file the empty contract. After he left, the lady whispered to us that they offered her the dog for $1000.00, but that we could probably get them down to $800.00 or $900.00.

$1000.00? For a dog? I was mortified! I was also sold. I just couldn’t help it. Here was this cuddly little dog living in what is basically a wooden box with one plexi-glass wall, and shredded, urine soaked newspaper on the floor. More than that, my wife kept looking at me with her big brown eyes… all the hell with it, “How much is he?” I asked when the sales person returned. “Well,” he stared, “how about we go in the booth and you guys can get some time alone with him.”

It was over before it started, and I knew it. I think the sales guy did too. He was just a kid, but he knew a sucker when he saw one. He held out on telling me the price. He let my wife sit with that dog in the booth for a long time, making sure she bonded with him more and more. He went on and on about what a great breed the Maltese is; how friendly, fun loving, easy to care for, and quiet they are. He said the store’s owner only buy’s from reputable breeders, and that all the puppies were guaranteed for three weeks, and how if he were to ever die, we could get a twenty percent discount on a new dog. My wife asked questions; how big would he get, is he sick, is he house trained, how do you house train him, etc.

All this was superfluous. I knew the real questions, and I wanted answers. So, again, I asked, “How much is he?” “$1100.00” came the reply.

This kid was smarter than I thought. He sat there all friendly and helpful, lulling me into a trusting relationship with him, selling me and my wife on the idea of a wonderful life with this little dog, and then socks it to me with an inflated price $100.00 more than it had been just fifteen minutes ago.

“$800.00.” I said. “The owner won’t let him go for less than $1000.00.” the stone faced kid replied. “Alright, $900.00” I said, knowing the kid could never out deal me and my years of negotiating skills. “Looking at my wife and the dog, who were both looking at me by this point, the kid said, “Mmmm… $1000.00 is the lowest we can go.”

Bastard.

More of those winged bags of money flew out of my mind’s window as I agreed to the little privateer’s conditions. I paid him for the dog and a small kennel to transport him in. We were given a small amount of some supplement to give him because he had “kennel cough”, and there was a slight danger he might not want to eat.

I have never seen my wife happier, or more at peace than just after we bought him. She carried him through the mall, and held him on her lap all the way home. I was convinced that regardless of the money, getting that little dog was the right thing. I am glad I did, and still do think it was the right thing to do. I can’t imagine life without him now. My wife named him Angel, and he is aptly named.

I'm a Grammar God

Who'de of thunk it?

You are a GRAMMAR GOD!


If your mission in life is not already to
preserve the English tongue, it should be.
Congratulations and thank you!


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