Be kind to your fair-weathered friends

When my stories are printed in the Pickens County Progress, my suspicious friend Donna asks, “Did that really happen?” Yes, ma’am. True life is much stranger than fiction and needs no embellishment from me. The job market is so competitive right now, that getting a job, and keeping it, is a whole other job in itself.

Yesterday, I was down to my last $30.00 and decided to finally apply for food stamps. At the DFACS office in Jasper, the doors were locked. The sign said they were “closed for furlough.”  Another sign said to apply for food stamps online, at the local library. But before I could use their computers, the library lady said I must pay a year-old fine. (My daughter’s kitten had delicately nibbled around the edges of her library book on Aviation, more specifically “U.S. Fighters.”) It cost me $30.20, with fees.

Libraries are supposed to be quiet, but I kept on hearing a loud tapping sound. The culprit was a red bird. Outside the big picture window, from a high perch in the crepe myrtle tree, he kept flying straight into the clear glass. I walked over to get a closer look. Someone had hung a big fake owl in the tree branches. Worried, I alerted the library lady. She smiled a tired little smile, as if this was the ten-thousandth time someone had mentioned it. “We hung the big fake owl there to make the red bird go away. It worked for about five days, but he came back. ” She explained, “He sees his reflection in the window and thinks it’s another male bird in his territory. Then he lunges at it.” She leaned in and whispered, “You know how men are.”
Then last night, a bird-brained solution came to me: The library lady could open some smelly cans of tuna and set them around the base of the crepe myrtle. After all, if a tiny kitten could keep me away from the library for a solid year, think what a contingent of starving cats could do to clear the airspace of one red bird. I’ll suggest it to her today when she lends me a glorious, towering stack of books. God bless the public library! In good times and bad, it’s free …if you borrow responsibly. Now, that’s food for thought.