Bread and birds

This is a strange kind of story, because the oh here let me just give you some background for setting and context part is probably much more interesting than the part I have deemed the point, but that's just my little way, you'll have to indulge me. The background is that after we arrived home post-wedding, utterly exhausted and pleasantly anticipating our flight the next day to London (and idly hoping we would get a free upgrade in honor of our honeymooning position), I went to pull out my passport and discovered that it was not at all where I thought it was. It was, in fact, as we determined after some hours of increasingly absurd and miserable searching, nowhere to be found at all. How it had managed to escape in the brief window after my return from Spain was especially mysterious, but gone it was.

Oh, the misery! Oh, the woe! Oh, the self hatred and utter wrungoutedness! Oh, the not at all encouraging information on various official websites! Oh, the hope-raising 2 am call to the consul at the night desk! The discouraging and conflicting information from the passport office after they opened at 8, the useless automated appointment phone line, the calls to the Pennsylvania records office to see if they could fax someone a copy of my birth certificate (ha ha), etc. But then I took my stuff and my sad story down to the actual passport office, and astonishingly enough, despite the fact that it looked just like the DMV, by dint of telling my story to everyone I encountered, they actually made me a passport, and it was in my hands a mere four and a half hours after I had arrived on their doorstep. I never thought I would be so fond of the State Department or so happy I lived in Washington.

Anyway, while all this was going on, I even got to go read a book and have lunch, out in the big world, while the gnomes in the back office passport mines were extricating my new passport. I had a book, there was money in my parking meter, and the world was shiny and new. As I was sitting at a pleasant outdoor table, reading my Michael Swanwick novel, a woman at the next table accidentally dropped her tuna salad sandwich on the ground. That was the end of lunch for her, but just the beginning for the birds in the vicinity.

A few pigeons of the big fat urban variety stopped by, as well as a pair of sparrow-ish birds. I soon realized that the larger of the two small brown birds was clearly the offspring of the smaller of the pair. This was evident in part because he* had that sort of fuzzy look about him that is often the only thing distinguishing half-grown birds from their fully-grown counterparts. But the thing that made their relationship utterly clear was their behavior. The smaller bird would hop up to a piece of bread and pick it up, and the larger bird would go into this full-on baby bird routine, peep-peep-peeping away and hopping up and down and half-spreading his wings, opening his beak and pumping his neck plaintively. The smaller bird would then pop the piece of bread right into his mouth, in no way altering the food along the way except in that she had picked it up for him. While he was swallowing, she hopped back to the mother lode, but before she could have any for herself, he started up again, peep peep won't you feed me? and into his mouth the next piece would go. I think she must have fed him well over a dozen pieces of bread before he flew competently off up into a tree and she could eat in peace. It was all so indicative of something about the mortal condition, it hardly bears mentioning.

*Yes, I am perhaps being unfair with my bird gender assumptions here. But I'm the one writing this story, so too bad for you.

Posted by redfox at September 08, 2003 12:43 AM (eating out)

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