Toads

When I was a kid, my dad was a businessman. He worked in an office in a tall building with sharp corners and many windows and he sat at his desk and talked on the phone and also went to meetings. He had a secretary and he carried a briefcase. I could picture him sitting in his office looking at papers and sometimes looking out the window.

Every day, when he got dressed, he put on a shirt with a lot of small, white buttons and a three-piece suit which was: a pair of pants with a matching vest with other buttons and a jacket to wear over that (and I knew it was called a sport coat). He wore a tie, too. When he came down to breakfast his necktie was tied but he had always forgotten to zip his fly. This was my job, to tell him to zip his fly. I don’t know if I said, “Dad, XYZ!” but I probably did. That was what we said, “XYZ!”

It stood for, “eXamine Your Zipper!”

When I went away to sleepover camp, I would get a letter or two from my dad, which he dictated to his secretary. These letters were among the very bests thing my dad did for me, and I went to camp knowing they would come, like a prize.

Bufo Americanus, American Toad, Dutchess County, NY

Now I am a grown-up, and almost an old lady, I have a husband, who I sometimes call the Bacon Provider. He has a job in the city, and by this I mean New York City. Every day, when he gets dressed, he puts on a shirt with lots of small, white buttons. Sometimes, he carries a briefcase. He doesn’t wear a tie to work, but he does have a secretary, although she isn’t called that, she is called his assistant. He rarely forgets to zip his fly.

At the farmhouse where we spend weekends, there are toads. They’re like the size of an apple, maybe, and speckledy brown and bumpy. Toads come out on our patio and just sit there. They have grumpy, frowning little faces, and brown all over bumps, and their front feet turn in. Maybe they make a toad noise but I haven’t heard it yet.

Anyway, sometimes the toads are there when we drive up to the house, sitting in front of the garage door. Other times, when we are driving down the driveway to leave on a Sunday night, there is one of the toads, sitting in the middle of the road, not moving at all. I always stop for a toad, not wanting to squish it, and hoping that the lights from the car’s headlights will scare it away. Nope. It doesn’t move. It never does. In the face of imminent danger, it just sits there. So, my husband, the Bacon Provider, he is the one who always hops out. He is a champion of small, helpless things and he walks to the front of the car. The toad never moves. The Bacon Provider stomps on the ground, but the toad just sits there. Some toads stiffen their front legs, to make themselves look tougher. The Bacon Provider very gently nudges the toad’s butt-end with the toe of his shoe. The toad will take a single hop, but it will still be in the path of the car. He has to touch it again and again to get it safely out of the way. 

I think This is all the Bacon Provider does at his job in the city, you know: Walking in front of the car and gently encouraging the toads to get out of the way.

Oh, Deer

The house we are renting has large windows, and the windows want washing, inside and out.  First I wasted a whole bottle of Windex and a whole roll of paper towels, having poked around in the closets looking for a proper squeegee, and finding none.  The dogs watched me going at the windows the whole time. I thought I was being interesting. It was the deer in the yard, though, that was the interesting part, and as I came in, out went Captain for a long, deer-chasing romp.

Later, I made for the closest hardware store I know of, in the near-ish town of Cross River. The hardware store makes keys, sells paint, and has the parts of your running toilet that will make it stop running. Like so many of the small hardware stores you find in strip-malls, it’s packed to the rafters with merchandise. I always find that you walk in and ask the guy behind the counter. Don’t bother looking for yourself. I was shown a few options, and picked a squeegee for which one must provide a handle. The clerk found a couple of possibilities for the pole, none of them perfect, but he did secure the pole to the squeegee with a screw, charging me for neither the pole nor the screw. Along the way, I got a bit of history (the upstairs of the store used to be the screening room of the old movie theater), and some predictions for snow this winter.

In Westchester County, deer (and black bear) can be hunted only by bow, and the season is from October 15^th to December 31^st. I have already met one man who has permission to hunt on this land.  The deer here are certainly plentiful, and a danger to motorists. I see them every morning when I walk the dogs to get the paper, all day when I look out the windows, every afternoon when I walk the dogs on the road, and every day when I am out driving.  There was a large doe killed recently on Cat Ridge Road, where I walk.  One of its hind legs was broken in the accident, and stuck out from its body at a disturbing angle. It happened on Friday night, and the carcass had been removed by Monday midday. Scavengers had only just started to make progress on it.

The deer here in Westchester seem well adapted to seeing people and cars and trucks, and give everything a good, long, dumb stare before walking or running away.  There is a group that I have seen grazing dully at the margins of the Taconic Thruway near Lagrangeville. The speed limit is 50 mph, but many people seem to take that as a polite suggestion, like flossing daily or changing your smoke-detector batteries twice a year. The one thing that seems to make deer try to leap high and run fast is my knuckleheaded dogs; they charge at deer, barking furiously in frustration, running as fast as they can with no plan for maneuvering over the stone walls that the deer hop over without much visible effort.  Maybe if deer made more noise I would respect them more.

My landlord informs me that he likes seeing the crows and ravens and vultures and eagles that come if the bow hunters leave the entrails after gutting a deer.  As a dog owner, the possibility of my dogs getting into rotting deer entrails is pretty scary, but it is not nearly as scary as the prospect of preventing any and all Vizsla escapes from October 15^th to December 31^st, from dawn to dusk.  I am pretty sure that Vizslas look as much like white-tail deer as any dog can.  

Safety Patrol

I try to get out for a walk every day.  There is an almost-three-mile loop from my front door on a country road with neither stripes nor shoulder.  The town speed limit is posted as 30 mph. This is loosely interpreted as whatever speed you will go.  Most cars seem to be aware of me and my leashed dogs, slow a bit (though never a lot), and give us room.  I have only had two scary encounters so far, the first happening during the first week of school.  It was a woman with a blond ponytail who drives a black BMW SUV and since she was on the phone she never did see me or my dogs. The second was this week, when the FedEx ground truck went by so fast Captain dove into the drainage ditch at the side of the road and cowered there, crouching.   

I do see other walkers, mostly women, sometimes with dogs and sometimes chatting and walking vigorously in pairs. There is one young woman who walks down the middle of the road, and who was not wearing shoes the first two times I saw her.  She has long, straight brown hair and bangs and large eyes that don’t look at you.  She wears clothes I can only describe as completely ordinary. But then she doesn’t have shoes on. With her is a dog that I would call a tan and white pit-bull mix. It wears no collar, and she carries no leash.  We saw them the very first time we went for a walk. The dog is out of control but friendly. The woman doesn’t really talk, not even about the dogs.  I gave her a nickname: Gandhi, pronounced “Candy.”

Two days ago, the dogs and I headed off to check the road-kill (which is another story completely), but found the road was blocked for repairs.  Yesterday, I passed the repair crew, and we exchanged smiles and nods. Cherry sneezed at the smell of the hot asphalt, and I got a chuckle out of that. But that day, we headed down the road past the stable with the intention of turning back at the half-way point.  I was thinking about the Haves and the Have-Nots on this road (which is also another story completely), when the vet pulled out onto the road next to me after a call to the stable.  He pulled up alongside of me and warned me, with concern in his voice, to look out for a pit-bull which is being walked loose and has been allowed to chase horses. “Don’t want it to be a problem for you.”

19

In high school, I took Animal Behavior one term and had a big clever white rat with red eyes I named Harvey.  Harvey spent some time in the Skinner box and under my tutelage learned an elaborate pattern involving pressing the bar and turning around and pressing the bar again (then there would be a pellet) Hooray!  Before the final presentation though, I got bronchitis and missed a week of school and by the time I came back the rat had died.