Where is the Goddam Cowbird?

“Oh, there’s all kinds of witches,” said the gray-haired crone as she pulled the leather-bound journal from off the shelf behind her desk.

“And which are you?” said Pippa, enjoying the banter with this cranky old lady in the Wicca World retail store, who was playing the part of mischievous witch to a fault.

“Depends on the situation or the person, I can be good or bad”, said the old woman, placing the book on the desk so that Pippa could examine it.

Pippa flicked through the writing journal to make sure it was suitable. The paper felt old but of high quality, the leather cover was embossed with a gold triangle, which made the journal feel important and a little bit mysterious; it was perfect for what she had in mind… until she got to the inside leaf, which contained a black-inked inscription in a foreign hand.

“Theban script,” said the old lady, “wisdom of the ancients”.

“Yes, but what does it say? It’s a gift for my father, and I don’t want to give him something inappropriate”. Pippa didn’t believe in magic, but all the same…

The witch took the book from Pippa and ran a gnarled finger back and forth, mumbling something… “It’s an old incantation that bestows fortune on the writer and the writing…”

“Good or bad?” laughed Pippa, not really wanting to know the answer.

The old lady laughed gaily along with her.

“It’s perfect,” said Pippa, handing over a $10 bill. She placed the journal in her tote bag.

“Can I also interest you in this old goat too ?” said the witch, pointing at a scrofulous and mangey monstrosity in a dark corner of the store. The stuffed goat was old inventory, and the old woman was desperate to get rid of the flea-ridden thing. Wicca World was perennially in the red.

Pippa blanched at the sight of the mutant bovid, mumbled an excuse and quickly left the store.

+++

It was a glorious dawn, the dun-headed cowbird trilled with joy at the first rays of sunlight, sounding exactly like an electric alarm clock.

“Fuck!”, said Cliff Archer. He’d had a rough night, hardly slept at all, but had finally drifted off in the pre-dawn murk, and then - beep-beep, beep-beep - the stupid cowbird starts its morning chorus on a branch of the maple tree right outside the bedroom window. Then, thump, Boris, the gray cat landed on Cliff’s neck.

“Asshole”, said Cliff, batting the cat aside. He grunted with discomfort as he reached for the lit-up smartphone on the bedside table. A text message informed him that the plumber couldn’t come and unblock the sewer – too busy – maybe tomorrow, maybe not.

“Shit!” said Cliff.

“Good morning to you too!” said Christy in response to her husband’s foul-mouthed commencement address. She was sitting cross-legged, eyes closed, doing her morning prayers.

“We should cut that damned maple tree down,” he grumbled, “get rid of the stinking birds so we can have some peace and quiet in the morning”.

“What a good idea,” said Christy, stealing a glimpse at the curmudgeon.

“And somebody flushed a tampon down the toilet again”.

“It really is a lovely start to the day,” said Christy, abandoning any pretense of the morning ritual.

+++

“What am I supposed to do with this… thing?” said Cliff, a smoldering volcano of a man, sitting at the kitchen table, staring at the black writing book with the gold triangle on the cover. The clogged sewer pipes weighed on his mind, and he really didn’t have time for this… frivolity, this imposition, this whatever it was.

“It’s a gratitude journal,” said Pippa enthusiastically, “you write a brief note of thanks each day and it will slowly transform your life. In a good way, I promise”.

“New age hippy nonsense,” said Cliff, pushing the book away from his half-eaten breakfast of pilchard and eggs, and a cooling cup of coffee. 

“Please try it, Dad, just for a few days. It’s a proven thing,” Pippa stabbed her finger at the apex of the golden triangle, “Happiness, positive emotional feedback,” she pointed to the next corner, “Health, less aches and pains, better sleep,” and emphatically pressing the third point, “ Social connections, better relationships, and likeability”.

“Likeability” might once have been a quality associated with Cliff, but it had long since been bludgeoned into submission by mortgage payments, arthritis and local property taxes. Blocked drains too.

“This is what they taught you at University?” said Cliff. The cost of private college was another source of irritation.

His wife was leaning against the kitchen counter, arms crossed, watching the father-daughter interaction with interest but low expectations; the man was in a post-retirement rut, and she was beginning to wonder whether it would ever end… the funk-rut. He’d been fun once.

“What have you got to lose?” said Christy, “you’re a miserable old grouch most of the time, you’re always complaining about something – your prostate, the bills, the weather, the sewers – you’ve got no friends, and you just sit around on the aforementioned prostate getting upset about what you see on cable news. You’re like a little black cloud raining on everybody’s parade.”

“Not fair and not true,” said Cliff, sipping at the insipid brew and staring at his to-do list for the day, a little resentful that his prostate had become fair game for the family, and more than a little bit agitated by the pressing matter of the sewers. “To-do: blocked drains, dump run, pay electric bill, pick up meds, check tire pressure (again)…” This day, like most days, presented itself as a litany of chores arranged metronomically around bathroom pit-stops and the availability of incompetent people.

“Day and date, and then you write a line or two of thanks. Here’s a pen I bought from Staples. Just try it while I’m staying with you this week,” said Pippa, who was visiting her parents. “I bought the diary at the Wicca World store in town… it will bring good fortune, promise.” She said this with a nagging doubt. What exactly had the old crone said to her about the inscription? Good or bad? Silly nonsense, of course.

Cliff liked the fancy pen, which conveyed a sense of gravitas. The leather-bound book must have cost Pippa quite a bit. Trapped by her good-will, resigned to his fate, he sighed, grabbed his to-do list and wrote down a new chore – “gratitude thing”. The coffee was cold, the cream had turned to slime, but he gulped it down.

Pippa and Christy nodded approval, “just for a few days, see what happens,” said Christy satisfied with this small concession to the power of positive thinking, “I’ve got to go to a fundraising meeting, why don’t you drop me off at the church when you take the garbage to the dump?”

“Give me a second,” said Cliff, “I need to take a leak first”.

“Lovely”, said Christy.

“Remember not to flush, Dad,” said Pippa to the receding Vesuvius.

+++

It was late, Christy was in bed, Pippa was out with friends. The US men’s soccer team had just lost 3-0 to Bolivia.  The players were over-paid, lazy narcissists, and the coach was a clueless technocrat. Cliff turned off the damned TV. He checked his to-do list; he had one more thing to do before he went to bed.  The gratitude thing.

Couldn’t do any harm, could it? Cliff flipped to the first blank page in the journal and wrote down the day and date, “Wednesday, July 30^th,” and then he waited… for something, the swerve of an atom, a random thought from the ether, a bolt of lightning. This was going to be harder than Pippa made it sound.

For what should he give thanks?  The sewer? His prostate? Inflation? Whom was he supposed to thank? The family? God? The Government? Was he supposed to give thanks or express gratitude, and what exactly was the difference and did it even matter? Like most things in the world of self-help psychobabble, it all seemed very complicated and just slightly beyond his intellectual reach. A familiar gray fog seemed to penetrate the deepest recesses of his brain.

“Thanks for nothing!” he wrote in a fit of petulance, and slammed the journal shut. 

+++

It was a fitful night for Cliff. Why was the sewer his responsibility? He went to the bathroom at least three times, stubbed his toe on the corner cabinet, accidently spilled a score of ibuprofen tablets into the wet sink, then tossed around in bed, waking to every strange twist and turn in the subterranean drains, a jittery drama that played out in his head. Every now and again, half-conscious, he’d check on his wife, sleeping like a baby, which made him resentful. Why couldn’t she see to the drains, find a plumber, makes some phone calls?

The drain plunged downwards, taking Cliff with it. He fell asleep in a dark, dank cesspool full of to-dos.

+++

Cliff shot awake. It was a dull gray day outside, heavy clouds, soggy and still. He reached for his smartphone. Nothing. No messages, no plumber, no news. It was nearly 9.30 am. He’d slept through the fucking cowbird alarm.

“Fuck, I’m late”.

Cliff twisted awkwardly to face his wife, but her side of the bed was empty, she was already up and about. She hadn’t bothered to wake him even though she knew he had to get up early. And where in hell was Boris, the goddam cat?

Cliff opened the curtains. Where was the goddam cowbird? Where, for that matter, was the goddam maple tree? 

He dressed, peed in the toilet, went downstairs; his knees felt like broken glass. Where were his goddam wife and daughter?

It was a rough start to the day.

+++

The day deteriorated.

The world, in most respects, seemed unchanged, adhering to the known, tested and reliable laws of physics.  Time winged onwards, measured by motion of the sun, by the ebb and flood of the tide, and by the immutably progressive linearity of cause and effect. Everyday things presented themselves to Cliff in a manner substantive, utterly trustworthy, and bruised-toe real.

Everything, in short, was normal.

Except, it seemed, for the absence of everyone and everything that he held most dear. 

At which realization, the bottom fell out of Cliff’s day, and he fell like Alice into an abyss. 

+++

Cliff burst into the Wicca World store brandishing the journal, causing the doorbell to jangle loudly. He was fired up and ready to launch an angry diatribe, but the first thing he encountered on the display cabinet by the door was a wild-eyed goat with a football-sized goiter on its neck. 

“Can it be fixed?” said the old lady, sitting at the desk in the corner of the store, apparently unsurprised by his grand entry.

“Pardon?” said Cliff. The goat appeared to be the work of a demented taxidermist. Nothing on earth could fix it.

“Indeed,” she said.

Cliff was confused, confounded and stared at the woman slack jawed. What was she talking about? He sensed that it wasn’t the goat.

“I suppose you are here about the journal?” said the old lady. She had an artful plan.

+++

Cliff could not quite remember why he’d agreed to take the goat, which sat on the kitchen table staring at him malevolently; it was some kind of diabolical quid pro quo. “Take it, you’ll learn to love it” said the witch-woman, “it’s all part of the lesson”. She’d been awfully eager to get rid of the thing. 

Anyhow, he’d taken the goat, and he’d taken her advice. “What the journal hath done, the journal can un-do”, she’d said with more than a bit of portentous pomposity.

Clifford opened the journal, drew a thick line under the prior day’s “thanks for nothing” entry, and started anew.

“Thursday, July 31^st, 2024. Thank you for the maple tree and the cowbird. Thank you for my health, for my house (minus the remaining mortgage), for my retirement savings…” Cliff felt the fog moving around his brain, but pen in hand, he pressed ahead with forced gratitude… “thank you for plumbing, heating and cooling systems, especially the plumbing…”. 

Tears welled up in his eyes as an unfamiliar ocean of feelings seemed to crash around him., “And thank you for my wife, Christy and my daughter, Pippa!” Sentimental claptrap under normal circumstances.

There was something else, something he'd forgotten.

The goat glared at him.

“And thank you for the goat”.

Cliff snapped the journal shut, placed the pen on the kitchen table, patted the stuffed goat on the distended neck, peed in the sink (there being nobody around), and went upstairs to his sad and empty bed.

+++

“Beep-beep, beep-beep.” It was the dun-headed cowbird, “beep-beep,” never had it sounded so reassuring.

Thump! Something landed heavily on Cliff’s neck. Dear little Boris the cat is back, thought Cliff, thankfully, though with a slight twinge of guilt. Playful little thing.

“What the fuck!” It was Christy. 

His wife’s uncharacteristic outburst plus a suffocating pressure on his esophagus alerted Cliff to an urgent need for full-on wakefulness. Boris the cat was excitedly trampling his head and throat.

Pippa, alarmed by the commotion, came running into her parents’ bedroom, and screamed.

Clifford opened his eyes and wished he hadn’t.

The beast's hot breath stank of hell, green bile frothed from its rotting maw. Its beady red eyes burned into his soul and its sharp hoofs chafed and scraped Cliff’s neck and face.  And yet it stomped around playfully here and there upon the stricken man.

The scrofulous goat seemed ever so pleased to greet the new dawn.