I may have told you this story before, but I don’t know what I called it or when it was written originally, but it is a good story nonetheless and well worth telling again.

It began in August of 1952, about a week after my first daughter, Barbara, was born.

My first wife, Grace, and I had free admission tickets (two Annie Oakleys) to the New York State Fair in Syracuse that year, and I decided to drive from Rochester, stay at a nearby B&B, and give my wife — who had endured a c&c delivery — a chance to get away and recoup from the ordeal, while I made good use of the complimentary ducats.

At the time, I owned a small, two-door Chevy coupe I considered my P&J (Pride and Joy). It was blue and had a blue interior. The NY State Thruway was brand new that year and cost only 40 cents from Rochester to Syracuse.

So, we had to go — and it did her no good to protest.

However, protest she did. After a day at the Fair of watching me throw darts at balloons, lift and wield a weighted hammer that would normally demolish an iron pedestal, attending livestock reviews, riding numerous times on a rocking Ferris Wheel and death-defying Parachute Drop that would have given anyone pause — we experienced a stone-filled mattress and ice-cold eggs at the nearby B&B, and this was even more than I could take — Annie Oakley tickets or not!

By 10 the next morning, we were homeward bound. Asleep with her head in my lap I made no effort to describe the beauty of the birds hovering above us about half way from home, near the Montezuma swamp. There were, it seemed, hundreds — no, thousands of them — if not millions!

I tried to wake her up. I turned the radio on, then up as loud as it would go. But it did no good. Grace not only slept on soundly, but she started to snore!

The snoring made me think: if she snored normally here, what was it like at night, in bed?

My attention was drawn back to the aviaries. Look at those crazy birds! I said, aloud. There must be trillions of them! Look at em! Circling right above us! Diving! Swooping! . . . Coming right at us!

CRASH! CRUNCH!

Through the windshield they came! Bills, beaks, feet, feathers, wings, heads, bodies — everywhere! Birds impaled on the antenna, the gear shift, the hood ornament, in the grill — and broken glass everywhere, the steering wheel, in our laps, our hair — !

Grace sat bolt upright, instantly awake.

What the fuck — ! she screamed. Ironically, I thought instantly of Grandma Mills and her galvanized washtubs of hot water for chicken feathers and others, who among her clan were habitués of bad language.

When I finally brought the car to a stop, there was a trail of hundreds of dead and flapping birds behind us as far as the eye could see.

Getting on home, what with the hole in the windshield and the broken side windows, was a cold chore at 30 mph, not to mention the stink from cleaning out and throwing away a flock of a zillion dead and dying birds — wrens, sparrows, robins, egrets, doves, pigeons, owls, eagles, flamingoes, swallows, geese, penguins, you name it! — took the better part of two and a half hours.

My first wife never shut up about the damned birds, so I went to work that day to tell all my friends of the adventure on the NY State Thruway.

We met at the Big 25 Bar & Grille near the Channel 8 studios on Clinton Avenue, amidst hamburgers and beers, where I regaled them with exaggerated tales about the trip to Syracuse and the New York State Fait.

“Interesting,” said David Roberts, our news editor and my best friend. “This, by the way, is Mary Posey from Channel 10. Just call her Posey, the only name she answers to. And don’t get any ideas: Tom Kennedy has already spoken for her.” (Kennedy worked at a Buffalo TV station; he eventually married her, and they moved to Spain, where they produced a daughter.)

Despite David’s admonition, I asked Posey (who liked to drink and talk about James Joyce) to go out often and tried my damndest to get into her pants. But to no avail.

Grace continued to snore (occasionally), so we eventually got a divorce and she was able to marry Tom Hahn, and I was free to marry Christine Rosack. Both of us remained wed to our 2nd choices the rest of our lives.

David, Sr. was married to Martha and they had a bunch of kids including David, Jr. who became my best friend when we worked together before we retired; we worked at Carpetmax and moved to Georgia simultaneously and lived near each other in Cobb County.

Martha and David, Sr. did not get divorced until they moved to Beirut, Lebanon, and David, Sr. fell madly in love with a British Airways stewardess. Whether David, Sr. and the stew ever got married is moot; Martha married George Rumsey a few years later, and when he died, he left Martha well off.

Posey and Kennedy (and their daughter) prospered until the daughter fell under the spell of the Unification Church and Rev. Sun Myung Moon. PLAYBOY Magazine even did a piece about she and they, and Tom promptly left Europe for the U.S. to search for the girl. To my knowledge, his efforts were futile.

By the way, David, Sr. passed away of lung cancer in Perth, Australia, and David. Jr. was with him in his last miserable days. My best friend attended the funeral of my best friend.

To my way of thinking, all of this was due to a flock of aviary beings who did their thing while nobody but me was looking. Other motorists on the Thruway, plus the entire media, went out of their way to report no such phenomena.

The mass suicide of a gazillion birds, though an actuality, was mine and Grace’s to witness, but it was my misfortune, and sadly, my inability to explain satisfactorily to anyone who would listen that relegated this story to the arena of tsk, tsk, poor fellow!


Robert A. Mills
Copyright © 2014, all rights reserved, may not a published, re-written or broadcast without permission of the author