The Gift of the Magpie
Happy One Year Anniversary, Hippomuse!
The Gift of the Magpie was posted on Hippomuse on December 23, 2022. It was the first post at this Substack site, so this is a bit of an anniversary.
I like this story.
I decided to reprise it this week because, as the inaugural post, many subscribers will not have seen it. And... because this is the darkest week of the year, I wanted to put up something a little light. It's something appropriate for the season.
The title The Gift of the Magpie is a word play on O. Henry's 1905 holiday classic, The Gift of the Magi. I can't resist a bad pun.
The Gift of the Magpie, like many of the posts at Hippomuse, is meant to be read out loud. So go ahead and read it out loud.That is, read it to someone else who you know. You could get a strange reaction if you just start reading something aloud, say, in the middle of a McDonald's. But if, for whatever reason, you are eating in McDonald's then maybe you will get a strange reaction whether or not you read out loud.
Telling stories is social and participatory. Stories should be told after eating, at the table over coffee or liquor, or in a small chatty group by a fireplace. If you have no one to read to, read it to your dog(s) or cat(s). Dogs and cats are good listeners. They, too, like to tell stories by the fireplace. They also like coffee and liquor. We should listen to them more often.
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There had been nothing yesterday and only one the day before. The card Milly received the day before yesterday was from her dentist. It had a printed label and was addressed To All of Our Valued Patients, wishing her (and all of his valued patients) a Happy Holiday... and do not forget to make an appointment in the coming New Year to have your teeth cleaned and your gums examined because good dental hygiene could be the difference between a healthy, happy smile and disease, Disfigurement and DEATH.
Milly Toversenn taped her dentist's greeting card to her refrigerator door along with the similar cards she had received from her doctor (who advised her in the greeting card not to drink and drive over the holidays, as if she ever did either), her pharmacist whose holiday card reminded her to refill her high blood pressure medication, her bank whose season's greeting offered a new low interest credit card, and the greeting card (and business card) from her lawyer reminding her to update her will (and, if too late for that, for her executor to call about probating Milly's estate).
The cards were colorful and better than nothing, she thought. Milly had long outlived her husband and all of her friends. Her sister, Agnes, lived in Florida in one of those retirement centers, and they hadn't been on speaking terms for more than thirty years. Milly's daughter Cassie--married, divorced, then married and divorced and married and divorced again--lived somewhere in California on a commune without electricity or flush toilets. Cassie's children--Milly's grandchildren--were, well, who knows where they were. Milly never heard from Cassie or her grandchildren. And then her own son Teddy, poor Teddy, had never been the same since he had gone to fight somebody or other when he was in the Army. He had been in and out of the hospital since then. She didn't know where Teddy lived anymore or how he lived or if he lived.
She would soon go back to the window as she did every day watching for the mailman. She wanted to make sure that it was the mailman who actually got her holiday cupcake because Milly had heard about mailbox thieves who prowled the neighborhood around this time of year looking to steal checks, credit card information and maybe even cupcakes, who knows? She never saw the mailman. That was too bad, because she always had put out a small gift, one of her baked goods. Did the mailman celebrate Christmas or Hanukkah or something else or nothing? Everybody celebrates something, Milly thought. So she would leave her gift inside the mail box wrapped in aluminum foil. But somehow the U.S. Post Office knew when Milly was waiting because that was when they didn't come. They timed it just so. When she went to the kitchen for a cup of tea or went to the bathroom or left to answer a telemarketer or an unsolicited stock broker calling on the phone, that was when the mail (almost always bills and junk mail) was delivered. So she might see the mail truck driving away or maybe just hear it, but she never actually saw the mailman (or was he a she?), not once in all the years that she had lived “downstairs.”
Milly lived downstairs in the mother-in-law apartment in the basement of her own house. Or, rather, what had been her own house. She had sold it after her husband died, one of Cassie's ideas before she had joined the Commune. She had sold her house to a couple subject to a covenant drawn up by the same lawyer who had drawn up Milly's will. The covenant provided that Milly could rent the downstairs mother-in-law apartment for as long as she lived, if she wanted to. But seven months after they bought it, that couple sold the house for a whole lot more money than Milly had sold it for to them. The couple sold to an Investment Fund that bought older houses like this. Millie never met anyone from The Investment Fund, but it sent her a nice letter stating that she could continue to live in the basement apartment according to the covenant and here was where she should send the rent check (the rent that it had just raised) while, apparently, they (or, rather, it) waited for Milly to move out... or die.
So she did neither (so far) because she didn't want to live in one of those retirement centers like her sister Agnes. And, furthermore, it had been Milly's house and she knew that The Investment Fund would just knock it down and build a mixed use multifamily mid-rise like the other ones that had been built nearby. In the meantime, the house upstairs was “for rent,” but nobody rented it because the rent was very high and the house was very old and the water pipes knocked and the carpet smelled kind of moldy and The Investment Fund didn't want to fix up what it intended to knock down, so just Milly lived there in the basement apartment to look out the burgle-barred kitchen window for the mailman (or woman) to pick up the holiday cupcake.
The other cupcakes were harder to deliver. Every year, Milly also baked something for the three workers who came once a week in three separate trucks to pick up her garbage, her recyclables and her compostable kitchen waste. The City had mandated that everyone had to separate their garbage. Milly enjoyed the routine. It gave her something to do. She tied up her garbage in neat plastic bags. She carefully scrubbed every empty medicine and mustard bottle before putting it in the blue recycling can. She rinsed her grapefruit rinds, neatened her celery roots and scrubbed the chicken bones before putting them into the compost bin. And then, every year, at this time of year, Milly tried to give a home-baked something to each of the three refuse collectors. And every year she had failed.
The problem was the crows. Her crows: Joe, Sam and Fred.
Milly couldn't tell the difference between male and female crows, so the names she gave them could have been for either--Joseph or Josephine, Samuel or Samantha, Frederick or Fredericka. They were really big crows, although Joe was clearly the biggest of the three; and if behavior was any indicator, she thought they were all men crows. They always came in a group at the same time every morning and while Milly stood at the burgle-barred kitchen window watching for the mailman (or mailwoman), they landed just a few feet outside the window and watched Milly.
Caw. That was Joe, she knew, by his (or her) voice.
CaaaAAAaawww. That was Sam.
CaaaaAAAWWWW. That was Fred.
Every morning Milly laid out a peanut for Joe, Sam and Fred, one for each of them. If she was late, they scolded her, putting up an impatient racket: Caw! CaaaAAAaawww CaaaaAAAWWWW!
It was Milly's job, they knew, to reach in-between the burgle bars and put three peanuts on the sill, about six inches apart. One at a time, Joe, then Sam and lastly Fred would strut regally (like crows and men do) to the window and take his (or her) peanut. With not another peep, they would fly off to a McDonald's parking lot or a grocery store dumpster or wherever crows go during the day. Whether Milly had trained the three crows or the three crows had trained Milly was debatable, but she liked the routine, just like she liked sorting the garbage and waiting for the mail. Or, rather, she liked the routine most of the time--just not during the holidays.
Because Joe, Sam and Fred made it very hard for Milly to give her baked gifts to the refuse collectors. Unlike the mailman (or woman) whose present she could put inside her mailbox, she couldn't put a cupcake inside the garbage bins--they might get thrown into the trucks along with the trash.
The first time, several years ago, Milly tried to leave the baked treats wrapped in wax paper bags on top of the three bins--one for the garbage man, one for the recycle man and one for the compost collector. But Joe, Sam and Fred also saw the cakes on top of the bins. This one time of year, almost as if they knew the calendar, they ignored Milly's peanuts. First Joe, then Sam and lastly Fred, swooped down, grabbed a bag from a garbage bin top, tore it open on the sidewalk with his (or her) beak and quickly ate everything inside. Milly saw what they did from her kitchen window and yelled at them to stop. But Joe, Sam and Fred made a lot of noise, ate the food, left a mess, and completely ignored her. Obviously men crows, she thought.
Caw, caaaAAAaawww, and caaaaAAAWWWW they called back at Milly with confectioner's sugar on their beaks, and flew away. Then they were back the next morning for their daily peanuts.
You've been bad, thought Milly, and she told them so the next morning. But Joe, Sam and Fred said nothing and, as they snatched up their nuts, they looked at her, indifferently she thought, with their black bird eyes.
So in the ensuing years, Molly tried different ways to put out the baked goods for the holidays. First, she tried putting brownies into cookie tins. But Joe, Sam and Fred could smell the brownies right through the tins, pushed them off the top of the garbage bins with their beaks (Joe, the biggest, figured it out first) and the lids came off when the cookie tins hit the road. Caw, caaaAAAaawww, and caaaaAAAWWWW they laughed with brownie crumbs in their beaks and flew away.
Once, Milly attached shimmering bird tape to her packages of well-wrapped cookies to scare the crows away. But they laughed at the bird tape. Caw, caaaAAAaawww, and caaaaAAAWWWW they screeched and ate all the cookies anyway. She tied an inflatable owl to the garbage bins--to no avail. And then the next day, as though nothing had happened, they came back for their three peanuts.
Last year, Milly put three small home-baked rum and fruit cakes each inside a plastic bag, inside a paper bag, inside a larger cardboard box sealed with Scotch Tape wrapped up in foil and red ribbons, and put a gift box on top of each one of the garbage, the recycling and the compost bins. Then she watched from her kitchen burgle-barred window. At last, she thought, at last the goodies would get to the right people.
But not that time either. Because either they just knew by looking, or they could smell right through the plastic bags and the paper bags, the wrapping paper, ribbons and the cardboard boxes. In less than half a minute Joe, Sam and Fred had each stabbed their beaks right through all the packaging, foil, boxes and bags and everything, and were gobbling up every morsel of rum and fruit cake. Milly yelled at them from her kitchen, but Joe, Sam and Fred just yelled back at her--Caw, caaaAAAaawww, and caaaaAAAWWWW--and then flew off, strands of red ribbon trailing from their beaks and their flight a little more loopy than usual.
So Milly had finally given up. This year, she had gone to the grocery store. It had a bakery and a coffee shop. She asked to buy, and the clerk sold her a solitary cupcake wrapped up for the postman (or woman) and three store coupons each redeemable for one chocolate sprinkle cupcake. She wrote out a check instead of baking her own desserts. The young store clerk (or, at least, someone younger than Milly) thought that a hand-written check was an odd way to pay for anything, but her manager said to take the check anyway.
It was just no good to bake your own cupcakes if the crows got them all, Milly thought.
Milly wrapped up the one cupcake she had bought and put it inside her mailbox. She then put each of the three store coupons redeemable for a chocolate sprinkle cupcake inside three separate envelopes addressed, one apiece, to the garbage man, the recycling man and the compost collector. She taped the envelopes to the tops of their bins. Crow-proof, she thought. And then she waited.
Joe, Sam and Fred came on collection day. Christmas and Hanukkah overlapped that year and it was the last day of one and the eve of the other. The crows landed on top of the three bins. They stared at the white envelopes. They pecked gently at them, scratched at them with their claws. Milly held her breath. Caw said Joe. CaaaAAAaawww said Sam. CaaaaAAAWWWW said Fred. And then each one tore away the Scotch tape, snatched the envelopes with the cupcake coupons inside and immediately flew away with the envelopes in their beaks. No! yelled Milly. Stop! But they were gone.
They can't eat the coupons and they can't use them, she thought. What a waste. What a waste. She turned away from the window to lie down and, in those few minutes, the mailman (or mailwoman) must have come because she heard the mail truck drive up and then drive away.
Milly was sad, but not angry. Well, not too very angry. They were just birds, she thought. And men birds, too (most likely). The refuse collectors wouldn't notice the missing food anyway because, after all, the crows never left any for them anyhow.
The crows were back the next morning, like clock-work, for their peanuts, Joe, Sam and Fred.
They were quiet and preened their feathers. They quietly watched Milly come to the burgle-barred kitchen window. She was going to scold them for being holiday gift thieves. She was going to. Then she saw them on the outside window ledge: three cupcakes, from the grocery store, chocolate with sprinkles. About six inches apart.
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The image at the top of this story is used under the Open Fotos License (OFL). It is a modified recomposition of a photo originally attributed to: https://www.openfotos.com/view/crow-5004
by cam:cam report
description:Crow flying and looking like an eagle.