Bob in Benicia
Copyright © 1999 by Dave Badtke
On an evening dark and dreary, when I was thinking, up late, pondering lessons of long forgotten French, almost napping on my outstretched lounge chair, there came a tapping, a gentle rapping, a tapping on my window pane.
Startled from dreams in mispronounced, fragmented French that I had been reviewing before going to Paris, I heard again the tapping, the rapping on my window pane. I got up to look, to see what or who it could be. I opened my window and in rushed something - a large moth perhaps? - that circled my room and perched on my pallid bust of Callas - Maria that is.
"Bob!" I cried in surprise as he clung to Callas.
"Kansas, où est-il?" – Where is Kansas? he gasped with an accent flavored with Sacramento twang.
I was shocked to see him and confused that I was conversing in French with a puny little bird, though I was happy for the practice. I struggled to tell him that he was going west toward the ocean when he needed to go east to the center of the free world, to the center of America, where he would find Kansas amid vast fields of corn and grain interrupted by quaint farmhouses and silos and -
He cut me off saying he was a bird not an idiot; that he had come to my house specifically to get directions, not to hear rhapsodic descriptions of a state that had voted against science.
That hurt, I said. I was just trying to paint a verbal picture. "Mais pourquoi?" - But why? I asked him. Why did he want to go Kansas?
He told me that he had decided to emigrate to France, quitting the United States for good, after the April vote by the Kansas Board of Education to give creationism and evolution equal billing. The nerve of them, he said, to think that nature’s laws are democratic.
When we first met on the bench in Sacramento, he said, he was seeking advice but was afraid to ask me. The last person he had asked, a pretty young woman, sitting on the same bench where we had met, had been wearing a short skirt and had batted him against a tree when he jumped onto her bare knee and spoke to her in French.
He didn’t know why – I suggested she thought he was being fresh - but it took him days to recover and even more days to steel his courage to try again with me.
And what did I do but push him around and insult his intelligence and try, ultimately, to throw him into the branches of a tree.
I protested that I only thought of the act; that he had flown off voluntarily.
"N’y pensez plus!" - Forget about it, he said derogatorily.
Do you know what it’s like, he asked me ruffling his feathers and closing his eyes, to be cut off from your family tree by a vote? For you it’s easy. There’s Homer, Euclid, Dante, Copernicus, Mozart, Austen, Newton, Washington, Beethoven, Darwin, Melville, Lincoln, Einstein, Picasso and Nabokov in the human family tree: What’s a chimpanzee or monkey, more or less, to me?
But his whole grand family, the dinosaurs if you please, the largest, most powerful animals ever to live on earth, were severed like that – and he made a violent cutting motion with his left wing – from his forebears like the head of a Thanksgiving turkey cut at the neck.
But it’s only Kansas, I protested, "Ce n’est pas tout le monde!" – It’s not everyone! I said, who wants students to question his noble family tree.
Kansas today, he told me with finality, tomorrow the country. I’m off to France, the land of philosophy and faith, he said standing tall with his wings wide spread, the land of Voltaire in which faith and science coexist without votes being taken.
But what about frogs? I said, they eat frogs.
Sounds okay to me, he said, shaking his head heavily.
I realized he must be hungry and offered him food and water – though I had no birdseed, I thought peanuts and sunflowers might do - but he would bear no more delays and directed me to point towards Topeka and dismissed me with a wing brush and bid me adieu.
He flew to the sill where I hesitated to open the window, where I hesitated to let him fly free.
After Kansas what? I asked him, I asked him what he planned to do then.
"Apres, je vais survoler Paris," – After, I’ll fly over Paris, he said as tears filled his eyes and flowed down his beak.
I asked him, as I opened my window, if all birds spoke French, and he smiled at me as best a bird can do with a hard, solid beak, and said only ravens, "Mais oui." – Of course.
No way, I said, outraged: You’re a sparrow or wren or some such kind of small bird like that.
"Jamais plus!" – Nevermore! he said and flew away free.
- Dave would be happy to send you proof that Bob is not a raven. Simply send an email to Dave@Badtke.com and his picture will eventually be returned to you..
- Dave Badtke is founder of the developing Carquinez Review literary journal. Find him on the web at www.CarquinezReview.com.
Contact him at:
Dave@CarquinezReview.com or Dave@Badtke.com