politics is a bad habit Juniper usually gets me up at some obscene hour of the morning, usually around 5:00, give or take half an hour. Then she inevitably voices her desire to sit in the front yard and pick clover while I attempt to drink enough coffee to feel alive again. The last few weeks during this ritual, I have noticed a pair of pigeons. Pigeons in themselves are not a curious phenomenon in this area; there is a gigantic flock of them that feeds down the street from here, where a frumpy lady throws popcorn and bread out for them. However, these two pigeons are notable for their coloring and their separatist tendencies. The flock of pigeons is made up invariably of the feathered-rat-grey type of pigeons, but these two are black and white. One is more white than black, and I call him Yang (of course). The other, more black than white, I call Shirley. Ha ha, no just kidding, I call her Yin. I of course made up a whole love story about these two, how they weren't accepted by the crowd because of their difference, but still fatefully found each other, to live out their lives in the glow of true pigeon love. Now they scorn the shallow mainstream of the flock and their white bread in favor of each other's company and the more nutritious fodder in my lawn. However, this morning, only Yang went waddling and pecking through my yard. I was briefly traumatized, thinking some evil had befallen poor Yin, but then I saw a flash of white over in the flock: that faithless bitch went over to the multitude. Poor Yang. Speaking of pigeons, some friends of a friend had a baby daughter and named her Paloma, which means pigeon in Spanish. Or, if you were going to take a more generous attitude, you could say it means dove. I prefer making fun of people to being generous, but hey, I named my daughter after a tree. |