Marathon Man

The Denver Marathon was this morning. I cannot believe I've lived here for 15 years and the extent of my involvement with it has only been viewing it on t.v.

You'll be amazed to know that I got through it in only 42 minutes. It was arduous, for sure. There were moments when I thought I wouldn't make it. But I slogged on, veering down the city streets, crawling at points, but never giving up.

40 minutes in, I made my big break... finding a left turn that wasn't blockaded, I sped west toward the highway and circumvented the rest of the city with ease. Now, in the comfort of the coffee shop, I realize that marathons are not for me. Just the same, I now understand the tremendous sense of accomplishment involved in such an undertaking.

I'll Say Hi to the Big Bopper for You

I have to fly out on assignment tomorrow. But here's the thing: it's on a corporate jet, a small one, the kind you practice yoga to board. And the flight is over various ranges of the Rocky Mountains. I have a thing about small planes and mountainsides. I don't believe in any kind of symbiotic relationship between them. Flying over mountains doesn't unnerve me. It's the having to emergency land into their granite sides and jagged pitches... they're just not well designed runways. Flying over Nebraska or Kansas, however, no big deal. Basic runway states. Land anywhere. Hey: try the corn. Flying over large bodies of water does not unnerve me... unless those bodies are also referred to as oceans. And then, as soft as I think that landing would be compared to the early harvest of some midwestern cornfield, there's the whole, "Let's get out of the plane, float around and wait for a search party" thing... because when I think of ocean search parties, I think dorsal fins and sharky bitey death. It's not bad enough that you have to crash, escape and swim for hours -- it's that now you get the opportunity for mind-twistingly painful disembowlment by serrated mawed killing machines. Sweet.

On the bright side, flying over the mountains at least ensures a sudden death if one crashes. Ooh... umm... unless your a soccer team flying over the Andes.

I always try to dress nice when I fly, though. It's sometimes gotten me upgrades to first class if I'm hanging out in a suit and tie. But that's not really why I'm in the suit and tie. I'm in it because if my plane crashes, I'll at least go to heaven looking somewhat formal, because if dressing for success counts anywhere...

I'd be so much more comfortable in my riding leathers, though. And, less chance of severe burns. Hell, I might even start wearing my helmet. Then I could say to the other passengers, "I really don't like our chances on this flight. Hey, has the drink cart been by yet?"

Sunstain

I've tried to ignore it. I really have. But every morning as I towel off from my bleary-eyed sudsy ritual, I look down at the 2.5" perfectly square brown splotches atop my feet and note that, yes, they're still there: sunstain tattooes inked by the exposure area of my Tevas sandals, during a trip to South Beach to visit my dear friends Cat and Paul.

In February, 2004.

Wtf?

I suppose they would have been better protected had I worn socks. But had I worn socks in sandals, I never would have met any of my Janes, and further I would have had to marinate in a vat of Cartier and Aqua di Gio then immolate myself atop a pyre of GQ and Details magazines while onlookers launch motley-colored Crocs from Speedo slingshots at my broiling, bubbling head.

You know, on principal.

Because I grew up in NY -- and that's where fashion comes from.

Christmas Goose (Part 5)

We sawed off the other wing, and turned our attention to the head and feet. I hoped filleting the bird would save some of the gore, but with limited counter space it was clear that the remaining appendages would need to be removed, and decapitation was in order. It would be for the best to bring inside as little of the bird as possible. The image of a bloodied, wingless goose complete with head and feet, sprawled across the counter in my well-lit kitchen was too surreal, and I brought the butcher knife down against the neck.

Parts thunked into the trashcan. I felt dirty. Granted, I was covered in goose bile and blood, but I felt dirty inside. And though I hadn’t killed the bird, and though its systematic mutilation seemed necessary to eat it, there was a depravity in the act, worsened by the sheer incompetence in accomplishing the job. These sick feelings heightened when Mark nodded toward the second bird, “I’m gonna let you handle that one yourself,” he said.

I paused, staring at its intact beauty. My hands had gone numb again, and the foul smell that had soaked into them kept me on the brink of gagging. I blinked, looked at Mark, and then slowly toward the trashcan.
He shook his head, “You shouldn’t have taken two.”
“I shouldn’t have taken one,” I added. “You want it?”
“Hell no,” he said without hesitation, and opened the second trash bag for our feathered friend.

We quickly swept up and sealed both bags. Mark grabbed the hacked bird torso and went inside to wash. I pulled my cap low to my eyes, scooped the hood of my parka over my head, and crept to the back alley to discard the incriminating evidence into an empty trashcan – an empty trashcan at the opposite end of the alley, that is. Though I wished no ill will upon my neighbor, the anxiety of waiting for garbage pickup for three days was more than I was prepared to cope with.

I turned the handle to the back door using my coat sleeves, and stepped in, realizing my face had gone numb from the cold as the 68-degree climate seared rosy life across it. The mutilated bird lay on my white countertop, awaiting surgery. Mark assisted in filleting the breasts, and we dropped them in a bowl of salted water, to help extract additional blood. I rooted around for the birdshot and extracted four pieces of lead.
Janie walked in, martini in hand, “Where’s the rest of it?”
Both Mark and I scowled at her, and she stepped back.
“Honey,” I calmly said, “Are you even going to eat it?”
She cocked an eyebrow, “Not after what I saw.” She jerked away from me in disgust, “Jesus, Brian. What’s that smell?”
“Me, apparently.” I had washed several times before filleting the breasts, but could not remove the thick stench from my hands.

Later, Janie gave me some of her best, most girlie-smelling hand cream to overpower the goose odor, and it did improve things -- my hands smelled like lilac manure, a solid step above the musky carcass stench. I wore the smell for three days before it began to fade.

On the long trip from the parking lot to my office building at Rocky Mountain Arsenal, I had to pass many clusters of geese, padding about on the faded winter lawn. They cocked their tiny heads toward me, and some even approached as I scurried for the safety of the building. I was sure that they knew and were plotting against me. Perhaps they were just confused, wondering why I smelled like a goose but didn’t look like one. “Odd bird. Smells of lilac. He’s probably gay,” they seemed to say.

I dropped the filets at my mother’s house, including three recipes I’d researched for their preparation. Still, I had no interest in eating them.

Christmas dinner came and the family gathered around the table. My mother proudly carried a covered platter into the dining room as we unfolded our napkins over our laps. I would make do with side dishes and salad, I thought. Even though I wasn’t going to partake in the dining experience, I felt excited for the unveiling, that the others might enjoy the fruit of my gruesome labor. My mother placed the platter in the center of the table and removed the lid with flair, to a swell of oohs and ahs and assorted high praise.
“That looks great, Gail,” my stepfather exclaimed.
“Oh Gail,” Janie nodded, “It smells absolutely delicious.”
“Good work, Gail,” and, “Beautiful,” and, “I can’t wait to taste it.”

I remained silent, and stared at the platter. It was beautiful. It smelled delicious. The thought of it warmed my belly with Christmas delight. From all around the table, I felt the eyes of family and guests upon me, as I hadn’t said anything, instead staring, unblinking at the piece de resistance. I leaned over to my mother and whispered, “Where’s the goose?”
“Oh, honey,” she shook her head, “That wouldn’t have been enough to feed all of us. So I made this turkey instead. I threw your little package in the freezer. Don’t forget to take it home later.”

I did take it home, and placed it in the freezer, thinking that as soon as the nightmares stopped, I would cook it up. But I had to face it every time I needed an ice cube, and eventually the filets worked their way to the back corner of the freezer, next to the frozen okra and below a stack of undated, foil-sheathed slabs of mystery meats.

I didn’t forget about them, though. And, one balmy summer evening that July, I reached into the back corner of the freezer, pulled them out, and promptly dropped them in the trash on top of three recipes for a perfect Christmas goose dinner.

Christmas Goose (Part 4)

At home, Janie peered out the window as I hurriedly unloaded the boxes from the bed of my pickup truck and brought them around back away from the view of the neighbors. Janie leaned out the back door as I opened the lid of one box, then leaned back in and contorted her face, “Where’d you get THAT?”

I don’t know what I had been thinking, but as I searched for an explanation far more impressive than the truth, I realized there was nothing to be said. Janie knew I didn’t hunt. Janie knew me better than anyone, and though I longed to impress upon her the potential magnitude of my manliness, bringing home another hunter’s kill didn’t exactly bolster my macho image. “Do you remember Rick Da---?” I started.
“Rick Dangerfield? Oh God, yes. I mean, isn’t he the Director of Health and Safety for Fish and Wildlife?”
“Um, yeah.”
All evidence of disgust fled her face as she beamed, “That was so nice of him! How sweet! We should write him a thank you note right away.”
“Yeah. Sweet.”
“Ooh, but you’d better do something about… about… those,” once again overcome with expressions of nausea, she waved her hand as if to brush the geese off the back porch. “What are you going to do with those, anyway?”
“Mark’s coming over to show me how to strip them.”
“Mark who?”
“Mark. Mark Lomax?”
She stared blankly.
“Mark Lomax – my best friend? Has a wife, Marie? They were here last week for dinner?”
“Uh-huh. Whatever. I’m going to go look for my good stationary. Ooh, maybe I should bake him some thank you muffins instead. Or a pie. Which do you think?” But she disappeared into the house before I could tell her what I really thought.

Mark arrived with Marie promptly at 6:00 p.m. The temperature had dropped unfathomably, and we were both wrapped so heavily in sweaters and coats that our arms poked helplessly outward away from our sides like fluffy stick figures. We stood and examined the boxes. He looked none too thrilled, and frowned even more when I showed him my surgical tools: a serrated butcher knife, a well-worn paring knife, and a small, rusty pair of pruning shears that I had unearthed in the garage. They were no longer sharp enough to trim the rose bush, but I thought perhaps they could be of use now.

“That’s it? That’s all you have?” Mark shook his head.
“Well, I have a bread knife inside if you think—“
“Never mind. Where do you want to do this?”
“What’s wrong with right here?””Too small,” he surveyed the back porch, “We’re going to need to get two trash cans up here.”
“What for?”
“Feathers.”
I tried to envision filling two trashcans with feathers. It hardly seemed possible.
“How about the back yard? Do you have a light back here?”
I bit my lip, immediately regretting the act as the moisture was icily whisked away, “The only light is on the front porch.”
“The front porch is big enough.”
“But the neighbors.”
“We’ll have to do it as stealthily as possible. Plus, it’s not like your neighbors have nothing better to do than look out at your front porch.”

He didn’t know my neighbors.

We brought the geese, cans and tools to the front porch, which had nothing but a three-foot brick railing and an additional half-foot rise of jagged juniper bushes to obscure our clandestine procedure.

“What now?” I asked.
“Now we pluck one.”
“Can’t we just cut into it?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. I just hunt quail, Brian. I suppose it depends on how you want to serve it. We might be able to filet it.”

I thought of all the wasted parts, and how pathetic a filleted goose would look on the Christmas dinner table. I pictured myself carrying a platter to the table, amidst oohs and ahs of hungry family, and the piece de resistance looked something more like a big, browned whole turkey. “ I think I want to bake it,” I asserted.

Mark shook his head once more, and we commenced the joint plucking of the first bird.

The volume of feathers was astonishing. I kept pulling at a patch on the belly, each time removing a fist full of fluff, with little evidence of headway. No wonder jackets and comforters are filled with goose down. Why, I could have made two pillows, a duvet and a winter parka from this one goose. We held the bird over the trashcan and plucked and plucked but got nowhere. It wasn’t long before I couldn’t feel my fingers from the cold, and I was grateful for the numbness. I looked over my shoulder at the thermometer by the front door: ten degrees. Down floated around the garbage can, and blew gently into the driveway. The mess grew. After about forty more minutes we had exposed its belly. Another half hour saw the removal of the majority of feathers from its torso on every side.
“Now what,” I sighed.
“Now we remove its guts.”
“Like, how?”
“Like you’d do with a store-bought turkey, I guess,” Mark shrugged.
“Oh, yeah. Right.” I’d never cleaned a bird before. “So, like, how?”
Mark made a circle with the forefinger and thumb of his left hand, folded the fingers on his right hand together, and pushed them through the circle.
“You’re kidding.”
“Up the butt, man.”
“Alright. You do this one, I’ll watch and do the next.”
“Nuh-uh. Your bird. Your job. I’ll hold it and spread its legs.”
“Shouldn’t I use some kind of lubricant?”
“The blood will work fine,” he assured me as I recoiled. “C’mon man, it’s freezing out here,” he urged.
“Fine.” I located the port of entry, grabbed the bird by its floppy but stiffening neck in my other hand, turned my head away and pushed.
“Harder,” Mark said.
The sheer act of it was surreal to me. We were violently defiling one of God’s little creatures by porch light. I pushed harder, but my little bird friend seemed to have clenched pretty good in its death throes.
“Harder!” Mark said.
I couldn’t help it -- I broke out laughing as I thrust my pinched hand into the goose. ‘Yeah? Like that? Huh? You like that? HUH?”
“Harder!” Mark chuckled.
“C’mon! You know you like it, baby. C’mon!” I laughed. My hand broke through into the body cavity and I stopped laughing. The expression of revulsion on my face, however, caused Mark to double over with laughter, and he lost his grip on the bird.

The Venetian blinds on the front window separated as Janie and Marie looked out to see what the commotion was about. I turned around to face them, my new goose glove slid on up to my wrist, poised in the air over the trashcan. I smiled. The girls shrieked and the blinds snapped shut.

When Mark returned to his senses, he told me to extract everything I could from the body cavity. I began groping about inside, grabbing squishy lumps and pulled them out by the bloody handful. The second extraction left my hand and wrist covered in something black.
“Probably bile,” Mark said casually, but slowly began to ponder something.
I shoved my hand back inside and rooted around, ripping free anything that didn’t seem permanently attached. I pulled out another fistful.
“Keee-ripes!” My back arched and I extended both the bird and my hand as far away from me as possible, “What is that smell?” We were overcome by a putridity so foul that it escaped definition. It seemed to originate inside the bird, but most definitely extended to my bloody, blackened hand.
“Oh yeah,” Mark said from behind a gloved mitt that covered his nose and mouth, “You want to be careful when pulling the innards out. They have a musk gland or something in there that you don’t want to rupture.”
“You think?” I gagged.
“It’ll ruin the meat,” he added.
“So now what!”
“I don’t know. Start over with the other bird?”
“No way. Nuh-uh. I’m over it. Talk to me about filleting this damned thing. Can we cut into it?” I handed him the butcher knife with my clean hand, he put the bird on the porch floor and tried to find a way to approach the incision.
“I need more light.”
“We’ll have to take it inside.”
“It won’t fit on the counter.” With its wings now flopping freely from its torso, it must have been a good five feet wide. We resolved to remove the wings, and once again held it over the trash can, but the pruning shears were far too dull, and only seemed to crush cartilage and bone near its goose shoulder as Mark twisted and tugged at it. I handed him the butcher knife once more and he began to saw. “Pull on the wing and I’ll hold the body,” he said, cutting through the joint, the bird wobbling in a creepy lifelike fashion with each stroke. “Pull harder. It needs to be more taught.” I pulled harder. “No, harder.” He sawed away and sighed, “This knife sucks. Let me have the shears again.” I traded him the shears for the knife and he began pruning bone once more. “Pull harder!” he demanded through gritted teeth.

We were both fully back on our heels as though engaged in a twisted tug of war when the wing ripped free. He fell on his butt, mutilated bird landing in his lap, and I reeled backwards without footing, flailing my arms to gain balance, waving a massive butchered wing overhead.

The blinds parted right before the wing collided with the front window, causing the girls to shriek wildly. It must have been quite a sight for Janie and Marie, Mark on the ground with a one-winged butchered bird in his lap and me dancing about the porch, waving a three-foot wing in one hand and a butcher knife in the other, a cloud of pinfeathers swirling at my feet. They didn’t open the blinds again.

Christmas Goose (Part 3)

I met Rick in the bitter, windswept parking lot. Tumbleweeds hurried across the pavement, and huddled together under the frames of the vehicles, shivering. I tried not to quiver in front of Rick, but the wind pierced through my parka and bit at my ears under my wool cap, and I had forgotten to wear the long johns I usually use to give me more girth under my clothing. Rick waited patiently in his short sleeve Fish and Wildlife shirt and khaki slacks, leaning comfortably against his truck, picking at his manicured cuticles with a Swiss Army knife.

He dropped the tailgate on his pickup truck and raised the door for the cap. I peered in: feathered death. There appeared to be about eight slain geese piled atop one another, their hopes and dreams ventilated by birdshot through their bellies, tiny purple tongues protruding out from their slack beaks.

It had never occurred to me that geese have tongues.

“Take your pick, excepting these three in the front here. They’re for the orphans.”

“Of course they are. Wow, there’s a lot of them. And… and look: they have feathers. Look at that. They’re all… feathery.” I’m not sure if I expected them to be set properly in a Styrofoam tray and shrink wrapped, but I hadn’t calculated the plucking process. I paused and wondered if it was in poor form to decline his offer. I wondered if he’d realize that I knew nothing of guns and killing and diesel trucks, and that perhaps my only claim to masculinity was a ritual morning shave.

Rick looked back toward the offices, “Go ahead and grab one.”

I had to crawl over the carnage, trying my best to cling to the ceiling of the cap, legs split across the bed from wheel well to wheel well while I closed my eyes and squeezed the smooth, cool neck of one of the geese and pulled him out with me. It was surprisingly heavy. I laid him across the tailgate, his head slung limp over one side, his tail feathers sticking out over the other. “I had no idea they were this big.”

“Dinner with the girlfriend?” he asked.

“Yeah… umm… no—“ Why is he asking about Janie? “Well, yeah. Janie and my mother, stepfather, his kids, some neighbors—“

“Better take two,” he smiled generously, quickly looked about and urged me back into the truck.

Iew. I dragged another out, and he brushed my Christmas dinner to the pavement below before slamming the tailgate shut and dropping the cap door, to lock it.

“Best get those in your truck,” he clapped his hand on my shoulder as though I’d done him a favor and then strutted back to his office.

I left them on the ground, pulled my truck around and hefted each of them into the open bed with a thunk! My light, Nissan pickup bobbed with each impact. I was amazed at their weight.

In the warmth of my officicle my brain began to thaw and I realized I had no idea of how to prepare a goose. From the Internet, I downloaded three succulent looking recipes for the perfect Christmas goose dinner. Notably, none of the entrée presentations included feathers. I wasn’t sure about how to pluck feathers, and wanted to approach the task properly, so as not to risk damaging the final, magnificent presentation of my delectable geese.

I called my good friend Mark Lomax, whom I knew to trudge through brush and shoot at things, sometimes wildlife. Surely he would know the best defeathering method.

“What do you mean you have geese? Where?” he asked, with a curious alarmed tone.
“In the back of my truck, man.”
“At the Arsenal? You’d better get them out of there.” He hurriedly explained to me the criminal punitions for the possession of geese without a hunting license.
“But I didn’t hunt them. I’m not a hunter. I don’t even have a gun. I’m a gatherer,” I cried, “I gathered the geese!”
“Doesn’t matter,” Mark added. “You’re in possession of a migratory bird without a hunting and conservation stamp.” He elaborated, touching upon powerful imagery such as imprisonment and up to $15,000 in fines.

Doing what I do best, I panicked.

“Well, maybe they’re tagged,” he added.
“Like with a bar code?”
“No, you—They should have tags on them with the hunter’s name, address and total kill number?”
“What if they don’t?”
“Who gave you these geese,” he asked, appalled.
“Rick.”
“Rick Dangerfield?” he asked. Mark used to work at the Arsenal, right around the time that Rick started. “Why I can’t believe that. Did you talk to him? Wow, I haven’t seen him in years. Does he ever mention me?”
“Mark, focus.”
“Right. So, what kind of geese are they?”
“I don’t know. Dead geese.”
“Snow geese? Canadian geese?”
“How the hell should I know? It’s not like they carry papers.”
“Snow geese are predominantly white, and there’s no kill limit, so possession isn’t treated as harshly. Canadian geese have a light grey underbelly, dark wings and a dark head with a patch of—“
“White? A patch of white? Shit! I’m going to jail, aren’t I? Are they protected? Are they endangered? Oh God, I’m going to jail on possession.” But it wasn’t the cool kind of possession that might win you friends in jail and keep you alive. Christ, they beat the hell out of pedophiles in prison – what will they do to someone who seemingly kills endangered birds for fun?
“They’re not endangered,” Mark reassured me, “but there is a bag limit of six. How many did he have?”
“Like, eight, I think.”
“So he gave you two to get down to his possession limit.”
Bastard! I knew he was no good. I smiled, “Maybe I should tell someone?”
“Tell them what? That you have two dead Canadian honkers without a hunting license? Cover them up or something,” Mark urged. “Get a big box. You’ve got to stop at the guard post on the way out and, trust me, you don’t want them to see those. They’ll assume you got them off the Arsenal. Then you’ve got another federal crime to contend with, and – umm, don’t take this wrong, but – you’re a little too fancy to fare well in prison.” He continued to feed my fear with worst-case scenarios, painting mental pictures of a joyous Christmas day filled with beatings and unsolicited manly love.

“Dude,” I implored, “Will you please help me clean these things?”
“I don’t know anything about dressing geese.”
“I’m not entering them in a fashion show, Mark. I just want to get the feathers and stuff off so Janie can cook them.”
“Dressing means—forget it. Look, Brian, I hunt quail. I don’t know anything about cleaning a goose. Rick probably field dressed them anyway.”
“I think the only thing he did was shoot them.”
“You mean he didn’t clean them at all? That’s not cool.”
Ah-ha! “He was supposed to clean them?”
“Well, it’s sort of hunters’ code to at least field dress the gift of a kill.”
“Well, he certainly didn’t. So I guess I have to. Will you help me?”

Mark moaned. I thought that hunter-types longed to get blood on their hands. Shouldn’t cleaning the kill be nearly as enjoyable as killing the kill? “Brian, I don’t know. It’s so damned cold, and I need to put up decorations tonight. And I have to make dinner for Marie and myself. And I have an early—“
“Dude! Pleeeease! I’m begging you man. I’ll totally owe you a favor. You may not know much about geese, but it’s 100% more than I know.”

After more moaning, Mark conceded. He instructed me to have clipping shears, sharp knives, and garbage bags at the ready. I smiled for a moment, thinking of sharp knives and shears and other manly instruments of destruction. I didn’t, however, envision their application.

I went to the supply room to steal a garbage bag to stuff the geese in, only to discover wastebasket-size clear trash bags. I took two, and then took two of the largest boxes I could find out of the reproduction room. Outside in the biting cold, I gripped the smooth, cold carcasses and shoved them into the bags. One purple tongue was pressed tautly against the clear plastic. I jammed the bags into the boxes, guiltily looking this way and that, and then sweated out the rest of the icy day in my cubicle, dreading the ride past the guard post and all the way home.

I normally speed a bit when driving, but all the way off the Arsenal I maintained the exact speed limit. Police should be most wary of those that do the speed limit.

Christmas Goose (Part 2)

The email plinked into officicles across the floor on a bitterly cold Denver December morning: “Free Christmas Geese.” “Bagged my quota again,” Rick bragged, “so, I’m happy to offer a Christmas goose for your holiday table if you’re interested.”

What a braggart. I don’t need his testosterone-tainted gifts to feed my family. I’ve been a successful gatherer for years, gathering coupons and battling for superior position in the most combative assortment of holiday checkout queues – bringing to the table an impressive assortment of beasts for dollars off the pound, humbling lesser price shoppers for miles around. Rick probably couldn’t even arrange a smart and balanced floral centerpiece for his Christmas dinner.

Rick and I both worked at Rocky Mountain Arsenal, an Army base-turned Superfund cleanup site, slated for reintroduction into Colorado as a U.S. Fish and Wildlife protection area for the observation of bald and golden eagles every October as they migrated down from Alaska. The eagles would majestically swoop in, perch on a barren branch and rest for a moment. Then, as if to say, “What a dump,” they’d whoosh quickly on their way. I was an editor for a contracted recordkeeping company, convincing myself that the millions of pages of documents that crossed my desk should be free of typos and grammatical errors. Rick operated as Director of Health and Safety for U.S. Fish and Wildlife. I’m not sure if he found anything redeeming in that.

He had something mysterious about him that attracted all the women at the Arsenal. Perhaps it was his high-ranking position, or maybe the all-American Midwestern boy look, square jaw, piercing blue eyes, and a full head of hair that tousled itself to blond points that directed the eye to every one of the best of his perfectly chiseled features. He held a higher degree than I, a better position, drove a new truck every year, and smiled humbly though toothily at the ladies in such a fashion that they would lose their sensibilities and talk about him incessantly after he passed, blushing and playfully twisting their hair. I had no choice but to look up to him.

He stood a good three inches taller than I.

The last thing I wanted was to have Rick provide for my family. But with the financial embarrassment of an editor’s wages, the allure of a traditional Christmas goose became strong, even though I was unsure of whose tradition it was. Perhaps I could glean a little masculine glory by simply bringing such a kill to the table. I shot an email back quickly, typing with a dexterity and rapidity that surely couldn’t be replicated by Rick’s clunky, hunter hands, “Rick: The offer of holiday fowl is quite magnanimous of you,” I wrote, quietly hoping he’d have to walk to his bookshelf to search for a dusty dictionary, slip on the way, fall backwards and strike his perfectly shaped skull on the corner of his big Director’s wood desk – not in such a fashion as to kill him: I’m not petty or cruel. But perhaps just hard enough to leave him with a speech impediment and a propensity to drool slightly when he parted his lips to flash that bright smile.

With a slight grin I sent off the email. I stood up, grabbed my coffee cup, and turned to leave my officicle, when an email plinked into my inbox. Rick, RE: RE: Christmas Geese. “Brian, I am overjoyed at your timely response and reciprocally kind assistance with my dilemma. If it’s not an inconvenience, please be so kind as to meet me outside at 10:30 a.m. in the lower parking lot by the new, white, Ford F350, where you may choose from the assortment of my cache of fowl – excepting the three largest, which I will be delivering this evening to a home for orphaned and troubled children where I volunteer nights and weekends. I apologize for that shameless plug above, regarding the orphanage, but we are always looking for volunteers, as the home is seriously understaffed and in dire need of the kindness of whatever generous souls are willing to open their hearts to these beautiful children in need. I shall see you at 10:30. Thank you, Rick.”

Wow. What a total run-on sentence.

Christmas Goose (Part 1)

I had always fancied myself something of a man’s man, the sort of man to cause a woman to stop dead in the street, ponder her poor luck, then assume me married or gay.

Unfortunately, I never really had many of the trappings of the objective man’s man, such as biceps sculpted like boulders from the mighty Rocky Mountains, or the steel blue eyes that blaze from behind leathery but perfectly carved cheekbones, or a firm jaw supporting a broad-toothed smile which I would flash at some precious darling that caught my steely gaze from a shop window. Or perhaps I would stoically reserve its brilliance for good laughs over beers at the hunting lodge with the boys. I didn’t quite possess a fabulously broad chest, or shoulders you could land a Cessna aircraft along. I didn’t have buns like two red delicious apples straining against the back pockets of sturdy dirty denims, concealing a wallet full of cash.

To my knowledge, there’s never been much coveting of my anything by anyone.

I was also pretty aware that men’s men didn’t “fancy” themselves anything, since men’s men didn’t use words like fancy, or fabulous. I didn’t fill out my flannel shirts too well, and often heisted extra napkins from fast food restaurants for the purpose of padding the back pockets of my freshly washed Levi’s to lend to the appearance of having a backside at all.

Men’s men wielded power tools, and ventured into forests with firearms and Sawzalls to dispatch animals I considered cute and fuzzy, and bring them home to grill up with a German beer rather than to unwrap, sauté and serve with a fine pinot noir that sported notes of currant and pepper. In fact, my lone excursions into the wilderness, to date, could have been admonished by critics as cutting through the neighbor’s evergreen patch to shorten the tiring quarter-mile hike to ballroom dance lessons – a notion my father had to improve my marketability among single women.

“A lot of guys don’t dance, son,” he patted my teenage shoulder as he discreetly ushered me into my first lesson, “You need an edge. You really need an edge.”

So obviously when the opportunity presented itself decades later to bring home a goose for Christmas dinner, I leapt at it. I envisioned myself with three days growth of beard, strutting through my parent’s door in my buffalo checked hunting jacket, woolen pants, and deer stalker cap – proudly holding in my iron, calloused grip the limp neck of a magnificent goose, eliciting gasps of pride from my adoring family and girlfriend, Jane. In this vision it seemed to me that I should also have an empty shotgun resting open and smoking in the cradle of my other arm, as it was unlikely that any goose would swoon to death in the humbling presence of my new manly ensemble. Hence, the offer of a pre-murdered goose by a man possessing such manly appurtenances would have to suffice.