August 22, 2003

• The Goose at the Post Office

  
  

  [Written a day and a half before it was posted, because our ISP crashed yesterday morning--]

  
  

  I’m going to Wasilla again later today.  So far, this day is looking like a good one for driving down the valley.  Everything is clean and sparkling from yesterday’s rain, and there are sunny breaks in the clouds.

  
  

  This evening we celebrate our ninety-day “birthday”, Greyfox’s and mine, with our NA group.  His is a much greater accomplishment than mine, a much larger cause for celebration, because he quit alcohol, marijuana, tobacco, various pain-killing and mind altering pills, and sugar, as well as beginning work on transcending his narcissistic personality disorder, all at once.  The effects on his physical and mental health, and on our relationship, have been impressive and gratifying.

  
  

  I had been dropping my addictions and psychiatric disorders one by one over a period of decades, until all that remained three months ago was some recreational dope-smoking, so my giving that up was very small potatoes, relative to Greyfox’s giant leap in a healthy direction.  I had given up potatoes (and sugar and wheat and other stuff) last Halloween when I started this healthy allergen-and-addiction-free diet, which was my big recent giant step.  But I digress.  I want to tell you about the goose at the post office.

  
  

  I was on my way to Wasilla on Monday, and on an impulse had worn a dress and sandals with chunky medium heels.  I usually wear jeans and moccasins.  The whole dressing-up idea started with my looking at my wrists one day and thinking that I might be able to wear my big silver bangle bracelet again.  The last time I’d worn it, in 1994, it got stuck on my arm for several days until I applied a little bit of grease and a lot of force and took it off, hurting myself in the process.

  
  

  I found the bracelet, tried it on, and found that it slipped on and off with ease.  It needed polishing, and as I was shining it, I got the idea of dressing up for this town trip.  I had found a lacy white blouse, a navy blue pin-wale corduroy jumper dress, and some brand-new sheer Givenchy hose, in a recent bag sale at the Treasure Loft thrift store. 

  
  

  The shoes, Mootsie’s Tootsies, came later when I realized I’d need something more appropriate than my old fringed gray moccasins to wear with the dress.  I found them at the Women’s Center thrift shop on a day when shoes were half-price and got them for a buck fifty.  I looked like a spiffy stranger when I got all showered and dressed that day.  I was wearing four silver bangles on my left wrist and two on the right, but none of them was the big chunky one that started it all.  That one just didn’t look as good as the narrow ones, and the tinkling sounds were more pleasant than the big bracelet’s deeper chime, to my ears.

  
  

  I stopped in Willow to pick up a shipment of knives that had arrived for Greyfox’s stand.  I turned into the post office parking lot.  As I pulled around a parked pickup truck, I saw a goose in the space I was entering.  It was a brown domestic goose, with the somewhat “soft” look that I associate with age.  Younger fowl seem to have sharper outlines, to me.  Their feathers lack the fuzzy, fringed appearance of older birds, and the bills of ducks and geese seem to get beat-up and lose their clean sharp outlines with age.

  
  

  Anyhow, she moved away, up onto the sidewalk, as my car approached.  Another woman parked next to me and got out of her car right after I got out of mine.  We looked at the goose, exchanged looks and then back at the goose and said to her in unison, “Are you lost?”  With a shared chuckle, we stepped up onto the sidewalk and headed into the building.  The goose moved away from us, onto the lawn.  She was a pretty thing, and I walked slowly, admiring her on my way to the door.

  
  

  Then a boy about twelve years old approached on a bicycle, and started talking to the goose.  I could tell that they were acquainted by his familiar tone and the words he said:  “Goose, what are you doing here?” with exasperation in his voice.  He got off the bike, dropped it and started chasing the goose.

  
  

  I went on into the post office just in time to hear Madeleine,the clerk, ask the other woman if she knew anything about geese.  Apparently the little brown goose had been there a while.  I told Madeleine that a boy had come to take her home, and she said she hoped it was his goose.  I then related my observations about their existing relationship, and everyone had a chuckle.  We assumed that the situation was under control.

  
  

  After I got my big box of knives and headed back out to my car, I saw that the boy was still trying to catch the goose.  I opened the hatch and unburdened myself, then turned and watched for a moment.  Meanwhile, several people had noticed the action as they came and went from the post office.  A man asked the kid where he was going to take the goose, and he answered that his grandmother lived, “over that way,” and gestured off to the southwest, behind the post office.  The goose seemed determined to go east, toward the highway.

  
  

  I watched the boy and his grandmother’s goose as everyone else got in their cars and drove away.  I could see and feel his frustration.  He kept trying to catch her and she kept waddling away.  The two of them were moving nearer to the street.  Across that street and on the other side of a vacant lot, was the highway.  Besides normal traffic, there is a lot of road construction going on there now, with graders, rollers, belly-dump trucks, etc.  For the boy, this was an incident fraught with frustration, but for the goose I could see that it could be life-threatening.

  
  

  I took a look down at my dress, stockings, and sandals, and laughed at myself for, on this day of all days, deciding to dress up.  I remembered a number of painful scary incidents with various geese in my childhood.  But those were big white watch-dog ganders and I had been a little girl.  This was a squat brown goosey.  She was in danger and her mistress’s grandson was in distress.  I circled around her, getting between the two of them and the street, spread my arms and jingled my bangles.  She turned back into the post office parking lot.

  
  

  The boy and I kept trying to herd her toward grandma’s house, and she kept skirting around us.  I said to him that it looked like she was trying to get to the highway.  He said, “she doesn’t get out much.”  I don’t think it was intended as a joke.  He was getting winded from his efforts and I think he was trying to excuse, on grounds of inexperience, his inept efforts to corral grandma’s goose.  I didn’t laugh until later, and then I laughed most of the rest of the way into Wasilla.

  
  

  I think that the unaccustomed noise and activity of the construction would frighten the goose, but who’s to say that domestic fowl have no curiosity?  There hadn’t been that much noise and bustle in the little town of Willow during that goose’s lifetime.  Maybe she wanted to see up close what was going on.  Who knows?  The boy and I knew, even if the goose didn’t, that it wasn’t safe to let her get over there amid the construction equipment and traffic. 

  
  

  In exasperation, the boy abandoned his efforts to herd or gently approach the goose, and rushed her full-tilt.  She spread her wings, made a run for it, and did briefly gain a little air.  He saw the futility in that approach, backed off and went back to the gentler way.  We kept trying to move her toward Grandma’s house and she kept getting around us and heading for the road.  Then, the boy moved one way and I moved another, and he scared her toward me.  I reached out and wrapped one hand gently around her soft downy neck just behind her head.  He bent down and scooped her into his arms.

  
  

  As he stood by his bicycle obviously trying to figure out how to get on it and ride home with the goose, a man who apparently knew him came out of the post office.  He offered to watch the boy’s bike for him while he walked home with the bird.  I got in my car with a big grin on my face and mud on my new shoes.  The grin turned to full-out laughter before I was out of Willow.  As soon as I got to Greyfox’s cabin I changed out of the dress and sandals, back into my Glorious Vanderbutt jeans and fringed moccasins.

  
  

  

  • 10:33 pm
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