I feel like a duck.
What I mean is: I was remembering the bags of stiff days-old bread that my grandmother used to hand to me from a bottom cabinet in the kitchen at their house on Lake Palestine in Texas. It was usually a bag or bags filled with all the “butts” or the “ends” of the bread loaves that must not have been eaten before the new loaf was provided.
As a small child, one of my favorite things was going “down yonder” to the dock with her to feed the ducks.
Listening to the waves lap against the dock- depending on how recent the last storm was, or when the last speedboat had gone by being the determining factor on how hard they hit against the posts- we would make our way down the half grassy/ mostly muddy hill to the edge of the water.
In my mind, my grandmother wore a cream colored, lace trimmed apron over her clothes. The clothes themselves, I do remember. They usually consisted of neatly pressed pleated khakis with a matronly but sometimes festive and floral button down shirt of some silky material that seemed very fancy to me. She was nothing like my much more familiar chain-smoking, sitting-in-her-rocking-chair-all-day-cussing-at-CNN grandma who I was much more comfortable with. I didn’t spend much time with this grandmother, so everything she did seemed foreign and prim and fancy, and in a way, I admired it. But I also was afraid of both of my paternal grandparents. In my memories, I’m always observing them with an edge of caution.
But I’m pretty sure the apron thing is just my weird over-romanticized version of my grandmother: my brain filling in the gaps where PTSD leaves holes.
If it were summer, there might be a few bluebonnets along the way, and I would undoubtedly think about how scandalous picking them would be. It was totally illegal.
When we reached the dock, I would always pause to peek in at the minnows my grandfather kept in a tank next to the boathouse door. I wouldn’t stay there long: chased away by the smell of catfish bait in the bucket next to the minnow tank. In my young years, it was surely the worst stench I had yet encountered.
I would make sure to concentrate on looking down at my feet, making sure they stayed on the center line of nails that ran straight down the middle of the pier. As long as I kept my feet on that path, I wouldn't fall in.
I had great balance, as long as I was looking at my feet.
When I would arrive at the end of the dock, I'd usually stand there for a moment to gather my bearings. Surrounded on three sides by open water, I loved to close my eyes and listen to the
plink
plink
plunk
plink
of the water lapping sloppily at the posts underneath where we stood. I'd reach into the bag, break off a piece of the stiff bread, and toss it into the water. If they weren't there already, the ducks would quickly show up. If there were none in sight and my dad was with us- he'd call them. As modest as he was about it, he could do all sorts of great animal calls just with his voice. That was always especially fun, because then they'd fly in, and land in front of us on the water- skimming their webbed feet across the surface as they landed gracefully with hardly a splash- except for the rare few that had to make a wing-flapping show of it.
The mallards were my favorite.
Partly because they were my dad's favorite, and he'd been pointing them out to me since my very first memories of ducks. Partly because I was fascinated by their incredible blue-green iridescent heads and necks, and the way they shimmer in the light.
Later in life, I would realize my father teaching me about birds was the first lesson in which I remember being clearly taught how the female of a species pales in comparison to the male.
Today, I feel like a duck because my face is swollen from a raging tooth infection, and my lips feel about 5 times their normal size. It's a struggle to keep them closed, yet somehow I also can barely open them. After not being able to keep anything down for three days- days which included both my partner's birthday and Thanksgiving- one of the things now keeping me alive is bread- my stiff, gluten-free bread. I'm the only one in the house that eats it because I'm the only one in the house who is lucky enough to have a violent gluten allergy.
So I don't feel like a dick when I act like I have no manners at all and reach my whole arm into the bag, break off a piece of the stiff bread, and force it into my barely-open lips.
I feel like a duck.
