That old Duck

 

October 26, 1998

 

I found the picture of the duck, Carlton, as I was packing to change jobs. I had almost totally forgotten about the creature who had lived near our apartment in East Rutherford, and seeing its image again, I recalled it as well as the pet duck I owned as a kid.

 I know pet ducks are uncommon. Indeed, in some municipalities ‑‑ which are trying to get over the image of being a farm community ‑‑ having a duck is actually illegal. Secaucus for instance, so traumatized by the stigmata as Pig Capital of New Jersey outlawed the creatures. West Paterson, which used to serve the area as dairy, outlawed goats, sheep and cows as well as other farm animals.

 But when I was a kid, such creatures were still allowed in most communities. I must have been about eight or nine when a neighbor decided to give everyone of the local kids a baby chick for Easter, surprised even shocked when the chick grew up in the shape of a large white duck.

 At least, mine did. For some reason ‑‑ I supposed my family's adopting the creature made it struggle to survive when none of the others did. Each of the other children appeared at their door one day over the next few months, sad‑faced, relating news that their chick had fallen ill over night and died. Each then marveled how mine did not, asking me every day if the chick ‑‑ which was clearly now a duck ‑‑ felt all right, a little jealous when I said, certainly, and later, supportive as if the survival of that duck meant something important to all of us, a preservation of a past that was rapidly evaporating around us, as bulldozers knocked down the woods where we hung out.

 If the animal had a name, I don't recall it, though during  its stay my grandmother, uncles, grandfather and mother called it a number of things, often none of which could be considered flattery. I don't even remember what it ate, only that it used ‑‑ or attempted to use ‑‑ a litter pan containing cat litter, and that sometimes when it was in a mood it was likely to let loose with a load in your lap.

 The creature had the freedom of the house and the yard, and often as not waddled behind my waddling grandmother all day long, as if the duck believed the old woman as its mother, the duck quacking in that low, constant way of its as my grandmother grumbled.

 The duck died eventually from ingesting paint which it had found in the yard as men painted the outside of the house. We buried it near the fence and I remember how hurt I was and how lucky I felt to have had such an animal in my life.

 On January 1, 1990, Sharon and I moved to East Rutherford, and because it was the dead of winter we saw no duck in the yard down the street. We did meet a goose in Ward Park in Passaic that we called "the Mayor" because he had two female geese constantly in his attendance, and would stop from time to time to hoot and howl as if commenting on the world. He was known to chase cars and snap at the hands of people who tried to feed him, a moody, cantankerous old gentlemen from whom we kept our distance and yet went often to see, even in the dead of winter.

 By Spring, however, we discovered a new friend, one just as moody and likely to bite a finger, but one who lived in our neighborhood and swam in pool in the back yard of a local home, the sensation of local school children who paused often at the fence to wiggle their fingers temptingly at him, as he quacked along the fence in an attempt to nip them off.

 Carlton, as the owner called him, was one more miracle, in much the way my duck had been, a survivor to a science experiment gone wrong at the local grammar school. Student had tried to incubate some eggs and burned them all to a crisp, except for one, Carlton's.

 The neighbor across the street from the school took the creature in, gave him freedom of the yard and basement, set out a swimming pool for him to swim in during warmer weather. Everybody stopped to say hello, which only made the duck furious. He grew so ill tempered that dogs feared him and cats got out of his way. The only creature capable of dueling him was a raccoon which wounded him, but only after Carlton send the raccoon fleeing.

 Carlton walked with a limp ever after as a reminder of that confrontation.

 Carlton was already old when we came upon him, and never grew to like us much, only recognizing us when we came, following us along the fence to give us a piece of his mind. He was the one thing we both missed when we left East Rutherford, and the one creature we wondered about years later.

 in 1996, I went back, and found the creature, older, slower, but in no better mood, swimming in his pool nearly exclusively because old age would not let him waddle as he once had. It was from this time that the picture came, and I took it knowing the creature did not have long to live, knowing that if I did not take it at that moment when he was still well‑preserved, I would only later snap a picture of his dying, and I did not want that.

 By now, I am certain he has passed on, and yet, I have him contained in this photograph, the way he, the mayor and my own duck are in my mind, as immortal as my memory can make them, and part of some larger thing I cannot quite explain.