A most innocent activity, taking down christmas lights.
It is a late evening and I am standing in my front yard almost knee-deep in snow. We have these things in front of the house, larger than bushes but smaller than trees. Shrubs, maybe? I dunno. We’ve draped the christmas lights over these tree-things ever since that time I almost killed myself trying to get the lights down off the roof, which is a different story. I am cold and a little bored, and I have a lot of lights yet to go. Back and forth. Back and forth. Pull down the lights and loop them over my shoulder.
And then the string of lights gets snagged in the branches. I give it a couple of light tugs. Hmmm. It seems to be stuck. I look up at the gutter, thinking that maybe there is a leak up there and water has dripped onto the lights, freezing them in place. Nope. Again, hmmm. I wrap both hands around the string and give it a good hard jerk.
And something dark rockets out from the branches, hits me square on the nose, and begins beating the sides of my head furiously.
Several theories regarding the nature of the situation vie for my attention at this point. I calmly take them in order, dispensing with each one in a fraction of a second (I can be really methodical when I have to.) In brief, they are:
- Goddammit! followed quickly by
- Burglar in the bushes! Except there’s no one in front of you, smart guy. That leads us to
- Startled bird, which intersected my poor face whilst trying to escape. Plausible, but I can’t help noticing that it’s been a couple of seconds now and the beating still continues. One would think that a bird in this situation would hightail it out of the area. My panic begins to show itself with
- Tree-dwelling flying octopus!! which, upon reflection, I realize is getting a little silly. Coolly regrouping, I back off to number 3, but with a twist:
- It’s a bird, and now it’s lodged in the hood of my parka.
And so it is.
Allow me to digress slightly at this point and say that it had never really occurred to me that small birds could have talons. They use them to grip tree branches mostly, I’d guess. This bird, in its terror, is using them to scrabble madly at my scalp. This kinda forces them to my attention. Not that they don’t have competition. The little wings beating madly about my face and neck I also flag as important, as well as the godawful shrieking noise it is making, which the hood of my parka amplifies like a bandshell.
While all this is going on I (understandably, I think) fail to pay attention to the string of lights wound around my arm. It seems to be of quite secondary importance just now. Too bad. They get tangled up in my legs and I keel over backwards into the snow. I flail about helplessly for a bit, trying to free the little feathered demon from my hood. After a few seconds it works its way out, shakes itself off and flits off into the night, having apparently weathered the encounter better than I.
All is peaceful suddenly. I rest for a moment. I gaze up at the stars. I wonder how badly I am bleeding. And then something occurs to me. If any of my neighbors from across the street had happened to look out the window during my adventures they would not have been able to see the bird at all. It was too dark, they were too far away, and the bird was too small. All they would have seen was me, cheerfully taking down a string of lights, and then apparently succumbing to a grand mal seizure. And not one of them could be bothered to come outside and assist. Or yell “Hey, you all right?” from the doorway. Or even reach over to the end of the couch for the phone and punch 9-1-1. Lazy creeps.
I get up, dust myself off, and go into the house with as dignified an air as I can manage. I walk up to my wife and say “Honey, you’ll never guess what just happened to me.”
And I was right.