36—Card Table

When I got home from Dorothy’s shortly after five, the bird was peering through the living-room window with the look of one annoyed to have been kept waiting. 

I looked for the cats in the back room and didn’t find them on the bed or under it. Only slightly alarmed, I returned to the living room calling, “Hey everyone, time for dinner,”  and as I called was astonished to see my beloveds, right there, napping on either side of the sofa just like old times and unperturbed by the bird. At the sound of dinner, they uncurled, stretched long and slow, hopped down, and headed toward their placemats alongside the fridge.

“kwik,” said the bird, following along politely to the kitchen window.

“Well, now,” I exclaimed, “isn’t this nice. Everyone getting along.” 

I opened a can of food and served up the savory chicken-duck-salmon-with-carrots-and-hint-of-cranberry on two saucers. I then stood back and watched as the cats snarfed up their dinners and the bird—he really was cute—craned his neck to see over the window sill to the feast on the floor. 

As I returned to the sink to cap the leftovers, the orphan of the sea stepped back from the glass. 

“kwik kwik,” he pleaded with a forlorn tilt of his head. 

I gave it a thought. A little reward for good behavior. But to toss him a crust, I’d have to remove a screen. And what might that mean later for the wellbeing of the screens?

Meanwhile, down at the edge of the bay, Heron moved through the shallows, oh so cool and elegant, graceful and profound. The neighbors only have a gull, I heard Dorothy say, disdain falling like a bird dropping on the word gull.

I retired to the back room.

“KWWWAAWK,” came the piercing cry from the tar.

The cats fled, leaving their dinners half eaten.

I moved the saucers into the back room.

While MITTS hid under the bedspread, cd scarfed down both meals, backed away from the placemats and threw it all up.

I cleaned the slimy bluck out of the carpet then waited in the back room until the bird had flown off.

Stealing back to the kitchen, I saw that his stake out position at the top of the telephone pole past the motel was empty and sat down at my laptop to check email. The glare of the late afternoon sun made it impossible to read the screen. I closed the drape, which like all the other drapes was a heavy tan affair, clean but stained and depressing. 

It was then that the idea for a different work station came to me. "Everything's going to be all right," I told the cats, then drove into down and bought a card table and long phone cord.

Two hours later, I stepped back to admire my handiwork. Having positioned the new card table behind the partion that formed the back of the kitchen, I'd moved my laptop and other accessories from the kitchen and run the phone wire from my modem, up over the partition, along the wall above the kitchen cupboards, and down to the phone jack next to the kitchen window. It was perfect: No glare from the sun. No advertising my presence to the bird. And if I angled my chair just right, I still had a wide blue view of the Pacific. 

It wasn’t until two days later that the bird caught me carrying my dinner back to the card table. No longer able to track all my activity from atop his telephone pole, he began making frequent reconaissance flights past the window. 

Catching a glimpse of me at the card table, he would drop down and knock on the window. Concentrating was impossible. This was war. It was him or me. And if I couldn’t outwit a damned birdbrain, who the hell was I? 

As I was heating up some soup, a  mattress commercial caught my attention and the grand plan came to me.

With the single-minded determination and adrenalin of rage, I dismantled the bed in preparation for moving the frame, box springs, and mattress into the side room. Here I could wake up to the sound of the ocean and feel the fresh salt air wash over me during the night. More importantly, this arrangement would free up the back room for my study and get me away from the glare of the afternoon sun. If I set up my computer just right, I could look out through the bedroom door, across the living room, and through the big wide window at the Pacific. And to top it off, I would be out of range of any bird's eye view.

All was going well until the box springs got wedged in the doorway as I tried to force the rigid queen-sized hunk around the corner of the living room into the narrow side room. It was as I struggled get a grip on the springs that the panel show following the news began with a harrowing warning that dwarfed any terror I’d ever experienced or imagined.