Getting The Bird

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Wednesday - September 19, 2007

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Before you read this, you should know that I love animals big and small. I am especially attached to animals I have kept in my life, which include dogs, cats, mice, rats, chicks, rabbits, fish, turtles, tortoises and birds.

It’s not widely known, but like many young geeks I used to be a magician. Not on the level of Bobby Acoba or John Hirokawa, but I used to do parties and even won first place in a talent contest. In doing that I had a couple of white doves I named Alexander and Xaviera. OK, that was too much information, but my point is I like birds and their natural beauty.

The other Saturday, our 10-year-old daughter was going to be in a hula competition with her troupe at Kapiolani Park. She and my wife were going to stay over Friday night in a hotel with our daughter’s kumu. I was to join them at the park the next morning, and my wife said to be there extremely early as finding a parking space was going to be about as easy as the day after Thanksgiving at Ala Moana. I complied, but that meant skipping breakfast just to be there to get parking. I got there and found a nice parking spot, but the program wasn’t going to start for hours. There were food booths being set up, but as usual I had no cash on me to purchase anything. I called my wife, and she said that she ordered me a bento, which I’d receive when they all arrived and we’d have lunch.

I decided I would get a great seat on one of the benches in front of the stage pavilion. The sun was out and after about an hour, I felt like a bag of burnt microwave popcorn. So now I was hot and starving. I decided to move under the shade of some trees over another nearby bench.

That’s when my wife showed up and dropped off my bento. I flipped open the plastic cover and broke apart my chopsticks. I felt like the guy who just came out of the desert and was going to drink his first glass of ice-cold water.

I plunged my chopsticks into some Spam and rice when something from overhead landed on top of it. That’s right, a park pigeon on the branches above me made a major deposit on my lunch. I was out of my mind with hunger and got so upset with the birds that I was even yelling at them.

Suddenly, there seemed to be an orchestrated barrage of bird droppings flying at me. I managed to deftly dodge the bombardment and when I realized they hadn’t touched me, I shook my fist in the air with victory and taunted the birds to no end.

I sat there the rest of the afternoon satisfied that I had put all those birds in their place. As I walked back to my car, I was kind of proud that I had defied nature. That’s when I looked at my roof and saw that the pigeons had defied the paint on my car.