Niki Reese Eschen / Times Columnist | Posted: Tuesday, December 28, 2004 12:00 am
Did you ever think much about geese?
I didn/t, either, until a recent incident in a nearby park.
We walking women are occasionally accompanied by a token male, the husband of one of the walkers.
This gentleman is way past 6 feet tall. He usually walks with the younger, more quick-footed women. But, on a foggy autumn morning, he was stuck with me.
Little did I know it would really get his goose!
You see, the park has two big ponds, populated by ducks, geese and visiting waterbirds such as a snowy egret. (But that purely white bird is another story.)
Geese seem to be pretty territorial. My late husband, John Reese, actually had a "watch goose" character in one of his books. However, the park geese, one particularly nasty creature in particular, hated me.
Coming /round the bend to the back pond, I/d arm myself with a stick. Forget those old-fashioned pastoral pictures of the gentle goose girl, sweetly herding her docile birdies back to their pen 77 or wherever the heck they live.
That miserable park goose would charge at me, long neck extended horizontally and hissing furiously. He disappeared a couple of years ago, at Christmastime, and I hope somebody cooked his goose for Christmas dinner.
Anyway, I/m jogging along to keep up with a very tall, very long-legged companion when we enter Gooseville. Here come the geese and I/m ready to run. But no. They eyeball the big guy and, I swear, a gaggle of geese giggled.
Two came pretty close to him, displaying their best manners. My friend, a well known physician and bird lover, starts talking lovey dovey (lovey goosey?) talk to a couple of these frightening feathered fellows. Lo and behold, they start following us and he keeps talking. Why do they hate me and love him?
The answer comes from his wife, who tells us that the pair of geese actually followed him all the way from one pond to the other. They know him. She claims it/s because her husband is a "large animal." (Maybe they think he/s just a bigger goose.)
Their son 77 the walkers/ son, not the goose/s 77 has called his dad a large animal because, according to the son, his father "eats a lot, makes a lot of noise, and has unpredictable behavior."
Their other offspring, a daughter, is actually a large-animal vet. I guess this stuff runs in the family.
So, I don/t have to brandish my stick and I/m feeling like a silly goose.
Maybe, there really are some nice geese. After all, think of Mother Goose. Would she stick her neck out to hiss at anybody? On second thought, if she was really Mrs. Elizabeth Goose of 17th century Boston, as some historians think, she darn well might have had a daily hissy fit. After all, that poor woman had more than a dozen children!
"Silly" is often connected with geese 77 and the people who own them. A Greek fable tells about a peasant who discovered his goose was laying golden eggs. This greedy fellow, wanting more eggs more quickly, killed the goose that laid the golden egg.
Howard Hughes, who certainly didn/t need that kind of a goose, named his humungous wooden airplane "The Spruce Goose." Go figure.
The New Yorker tells a story that gives me goose bumps. He and his late wife used to dine occasionally at a fancy English restaurant in upstate New York. The owners maintained a lovely pond, populated with several geese. One was so nasty that it attacked a patron, who then fell down and broke her leg. The happening was written up in all the local papers.
Shortly thereafter, The New Yorker and his first wife went to dinner at the restaurant. Unfazed by publicity, they ordered roast goose. When the owner came over to greet them and see if they were enjoying their meal, they asked, "Whatever happened to that bad-tempered goose?"
"You/re eating him!" was the answer.
* Niki Reese Eschen can be reached at stiki@verizon.net.
Dec. 26, 2004