A healthy appreciation for pâté.

Last night, my father (The Prince of Darkness) called to chat. And by "chat" I mean "remind me of a really painful memory that will, inevitably, come to mind when choosing a quality nursing care facility when he can't hold his bowels."

When I was a little boy, my favorite place in the world was the Place Where You Can Feed The Ducks. It was a series of ponds and enclosures for migratory waterfowl to rest and consume algae, which always was in Amazon-like profusion. In the spring, some of the waterfowl would nest in the ponds, and I, fascinated by the concept of eggs and how they were wee ones encased in calcate shells, was spellbound by the nesting birds. So, what we'd do is stop by the local Wonderbread outlet to buy some bracingly stale day-old bread and then we'd go to Feed The Ducks, an activity that I was bribed with on several occasions.

My mother was gravid with my pupating sister, so my father decided to take me to Feed The Ducks, most likely because my mother wanted me out of her sweat-drenched and hormonally swinging hair. I had a bag of bread, and the ducks (mostly mallards, but also some Canadian geese) saw me coming and began to congregate.

Here's where my story and that of my "father" diverge.

My father contends that he told me not to feed all of the bread to the little, cute ducks, because there were a few nasty old knob-billed white geese in the pond, and, when they weren't making the smaller ducks their bitches, they would require sustenance as well. Since I was all of three and a half, maybe four, those geese outweighed me by several tons and they weren't thrilled with me giving all the bread to the cute little ones.

I contend that, since the white, nasty geese were evil, depriving them of food would cause them to die sooner, which would make it so I wouldn't have to endure their incessant hissing.

The outcome was simple enough. When the massive white goose realized I had no bread for him, he savagely attacked me by stabbing his fetid bill right between my eyes, and, when satisfied that I was nearly dead, began to stomp the everloving shit out of me. I still can hear my father's laughter as I was nearly slain by that velociraptor goose; laughter, and inaction.

Oh, I made it out alive. I came home to my mother, who saw the massive swelling on my forehead and asked how it came to be. "A duck beaked me", I responded, and she began to laugh, too.

That night, as I wove dolls out of their hair for the houdoun ritual I'd perform on them at dawn, I swore vengeance. Of course, my personal style of retribution is subtle. Oh, can't find your carkeys? Oh, I don't remember where I put your favorite pen. No, I don't know who laid cable in the houseplants.

If I ever have kids, I will swear to them in infancy that I will not allow seventy-pound greylag geese to savage them in their youthful innocence.

Speaking of geese, my grandmother Barbara (the West Virginia one) used to have three geese, who served no other purpose on the earth than to be terrifying. Nobody was safe. Near the gate to the barnyard was a walking stick and a croquet mallet, one of which you needed to have on you at all times. The geese would be somewhere, quietly taking the life of smaller, weaker creatures, and when they'd hear you they'd rush over to you, hissing, the pupils in their beady yellow eyes dialating in the sheer pleasure of the kill. Once, when the geese got into the henhouse, my mother and I took croquet mallets and batted them from here to Kingdom Come, lest they ravage the laying hens. When they became geriatric, they lost some of their resolve. One froze to death, another was carried off by a fox (we found a gore-covered wing in the pasture) and the last was euthanized via shotgun by my grandfather after it broke one, and then the other, of its legs. Can't say I was too sad to see them go, really, but it ruined my own plans of making a delightful French-inspired spread out of their entrails.

Lesson of the Day: Geese suck. You can't really trust your parents. And, most importantly, while walking through life, always carry a goddamned croquet mallet.

I remain, as ever,

Dom