First big news of the day- windfall! Free bread! Yep, someone (not me) 'burned' 2 pans of bread today. Burned... Okay, when I think burned, I think blackened exterior, toasted interior and unfit for human consumption. Burned is not 'a little browner than it ought to be'. But until I spoke up, my manager would have been happy to toss eight perfectly good if slightly browned loaves of bread! Waste not, want not. I think I worried her a bit though- when she said I could take them she said so in the tone of voice that suggested if she had another minute or two spare (you never do between 11.30 and about 3) she would write down the number of a soup kitchen or some other charitable organisation. My positive enthusiasm about said bread was apparently alarming. Still, when you're on short commons, you really know it... I may or may not have mentioned in an earlier post that the bottom eighth of my box of oat bran went bad so I had to toss it, and my rolled oats are almost a year past their sell-by date. I'm not sure if that _actually_ means they're bad... They smell okay. And I still have two tins of tomato soup left, one carton of butternut squash... Okay, back to the post at hand.
So I was walking back with my windfall of bread, my 'manna from Subway', when I got to the big hill that leads to my road. And there, on the road but near the curb was a little lump. This resolved itself, as I got closer, into a very, very still fledgling. It was alive. And it was bigger than most of the poor little things that you see dead, that fell out of their nests way too early. This one had feathers at least. And it wasn't dead. It wasn't happy, but it wasn't dead. It was trying to play dead though, I think. It messed up there by blinking. So I stopped a truck from hitting it, and in the process asked the lady who owned the truck if she had a shovel, or newspapers or something with which to move the poor thing to a safer location. All the while, the bird's parents were squalking and trying to fly interference for it. I think they got their neighbours in on the act too. She said she didn't but to try her house and that her father might have something suitable. I screwed up my courage to the sticking place and marched up to the front door of a total stranger to demand (politely request) his newspaper. While he got it, I went back to guard the bird from getting run over. When I finally got the paper, I tried to scoop the bird up onto it, but it wouldn't go. Now it decided that the whole 'playing dead' thing was not working, so it wobbled across the road. And by across, I mean that this not very intelligent avian decided to go ACROSS the street. Not into the yard that was closer. I think it was because it was facing that yard and got tunnel vision or something... I dunno. Anyway, I chased it carefully across the road, convinced that it was going to keel over of a weak heart any minute and more or less oblivious to the fact that I was causing, what was for FR, a major traffic jam. Then the lady who lived in the house where the birds had apparently been nesting finally got to park her car and came out to investigate. She said that once we got the fledgling into the neighbour's yard, it should be relatively safe. Its parents knew where it was and would look out for it occasionally- as well as do their best to keep off the cats. We saw one cat looking hopeful across the street and scared it off. I felt bad that there was nothing else I could do, but there wasn't, so I said a quick prayer to St. Francis and proceeded to walk home. I have never felt so much fellow feeling with a dumb animal before. And it's all for nothing, I'm sure. I'm fairly certain the cat got it. Or it was stupid and hopped right back into the road. But I tried, and stupidly enough, I feel better for having tried. I know I'm projecting allegory and meaning on to the whole darned thing, but I feel like I know something about having a hard time leaving the nest. Anyway, it certainly livened up my walk home.
Last topic of the night- family. The M___s came over for dinner tonight, which was nice because I got a chance to see LittleM, as I had not been able to before. And as we all finally sat around the table for dinner, I was struck by an odd feeling that had occurred to me almost from the moment the M___s came in. It's like having extended family over. If the five of us here are immediate family, our friends/former classmates are a kind of extended family. The nice thing about this extended family is that it doesn't bring its baggage to the dinner table, so we all had a great time talking about our plans for the future (or lack thereof) and our experiences with Seton and later college. It really felt like... family of a weird sort. The whole 'friends are the family you choose' idea, maybe? At the risk of sounding sappy, that's kind of what it was like. I liked it. It was peaceful and fun, just like our Shakespearean Sundays are. I don't want to idealize all of this, but it's just been so nice...
Which brings me to the next big point of prayer- it's still housing. Still no luck. Still need to hear a definite yes/no from the print shop.
And a freaking HUGE bug just crawled out of nowhere to be summarily pinned under one of my bargain bin books and some assorted groceries- eurgh! It was disgusting and huge... Hopefully it's now dead.
More news later. Like tomorrow later.
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