December 1, 2003

Today is my dad's 59th birthday. Bad daughter that I am, I only acknowledged the event by sending him an e-mail. My family is generally not that big on the whole presents thing. My older relatives usually acknowledge birthdays and Christmases by sending a check, which is definitely not a bad thing in and of itself, but it makes it sort of tricky to reciprocate.

Also today, my laziness actually paid off for once. I had planned to go to the DMV this morning, because the 30 day waiting period to apply for a new car registration sticker had finally lapsed. But I struggled out of bed late and foggy-headed this morning--I even accidentally wore the same sweatshirt to work today that I'd worn to go out the night before and realized when I got there that I reeked of spilled beer and secondhand pot smoke. So, I postponed my DMV trip until the next day, and sure enough, my sticker showed up in the mail today! It only took 32 days to get here from Sacramento. I guess the mailman must have delivered it here on foot the whole way.

But it seems that the long-awaited arrival of my sticker was just a temporary respite from my ongoing struggles with various government entities. My latest run-in with The Man began last night, as I returned home from the neighborhood taqueria with veggie burrito in hand. As I walked up 5th Avenue, just around the corner from my apartment, I saw a bird's pointy tail lurking in the shadows on the sidewalk. As I started to pass it, the first thought that popped into my head was "damn, that pigeon is HUGE!" but then immediately realized that it was not a pigeon, but a duck. A male Mallard duck. I moved in closer, and the duck didn't try to get away. He just started making some quiet sounds and made sort of a cowering motion against the garage door he was standing in front of.

I couldn't see any visible injuries, but his behavior seemed odd, not to mention his presence on a city street nowhere near a body of water. Golden Gate Park is just a couple of blocks away, and they do have some duck ponds there, but I'd never seen a duck wandering outside the park, or even in the park away from the ponds themselves. It all seemed off to me, so I decided to call Animal Control.

Of course, this was all happening on a Sunday evening, so when I called Animal Control, I got a recorded message listing normal business hours and instructing me that if I had an animal emergency, I should push "3." I hesitated--sure, the duck was acting strangely, but does an eccentric and ectopic duck really constitute an emergency? But after a second, it occurred to me that San Francisco is a city awash with fanatical animal lovers, and that their hotline is probably inundated all day with calls from people reporting squirrels with headaches and malnourished rats in the MUNI subway tunnels. So, I pressed "3."

A woman with a Spanish accent answered the phone soon afterward. "I might be overreacting," I began, "but there's a very confused- and disoriented-looking duck standing on the sidewalk around the corner from me." The woman politely heard me out, and then informed me that if anyone else called to report the duck, they'd send someone out to check him out. "He was probably just looking for food," she said, and I embarrassedly agreed, although it did not make any sense to me that a duck would leave his habitat to forage for food on the cement sidewalks of the Inner Sunset.

When I headed out for the evening about 45 minutes later, the duck was still in the same spot and looked as pathetic as ever. I resolved to call Animal Control again if he was still there when I got home. And hey, at least now I would have a wacky anecdote to share with everyone I encountered: "you know, I saw the craziest thing earlier this evening! There was a duck just hanging out on the sidewalk right around the corner from my house!"

And then when I got home, it was late, 2:30 a.m. The duck was still there. But now, there was evidence that someone else had noticed him, too. Someone had torn off pieces of bread and thrown them on the sidewalk, but it appeared that the duck hadn't responded to them. It had been raining, and the bread pieces had become gooey waterlogged blobs.

I went inside to call Animal Control again, now convinced that this was a bona fide animal emergency. It was most decidedly not normal for a duck to stay in place on a city street for 7 hours. So, I called them again, and they didn't answer the phone. I hung up the phone and then worried that I perhaps hadn't let it ring enough before giving up. I tried again, and still no answer. It was just like all the times I'd tried to call the DPT to narc on my alcoholic neighbor! Of what use is an emergency hotline if they don't bother to answer the phone! Admittedly, it was 2:30 a.m., but still, squirrels must get headaches in the middle of the night, too!

So, I went to bed, and in the morning, for better or for worse, he was gone. The soggy bread was still there, though.

I wonder where he is now.