06-07-00
My freshman year of college, my parents would drive down from Cedar Rapids every other weekend. They would take me out to lunch somewhere, and either take me grocery shopping or would provide me with a bag of hand-selected food items. The most numerous food items in these care packages were microwave popcorn and crackers - generic saltines and psuedo-ritz. I took to sticking the crackers and popcorn in my half of the center closet that I shared with my dorm roommate, Eve.
Periodically I would attempt to clear out some closet space by going down to the river by the IMU with a bag or two of popped popcorn, or a box of crackers, and I would sit on a bench and feed the ducks. The greedly little buggers would trample your feet to get something to eat, completely unafraid of being touched or eaten, practically snapping off your fingers as they snatched crackers from your hands before you could give them to someone else.
One day, I took my friend Kevin down to the river to experience the frenzy firsthand. The ducks at the river are mostly mallards; you have the standard complement of drakes and hens, periodically punctuated by a sexually-indeterminate canvasback. Anyways, Kevin and I were sitting there feeding them, when this gigantic white duck [I know what a duck looks like, it was not a goose] and this tiny canvasback with a little white spot in the middle of its forhead waddle over, looking to be fed. The other ducks would pick on the little canvasback, and the monstrous white duck would defend his little friend. Upon witnessing this spectacle, Kevin exclaimed that if ducks could play basketball, that duck would be a basketball-playing duck. I suppose that had this been a few years later, the duck would have been dubbed "Shaq" because of it's stature, but this was 1991, and the duck was heretoforward known as "The Basketball Duck." His little friend was, of course, "Pinhead."
These two characters occupied a special place in my heart, and I would favor them with more crackers and popcorn that the other ducks. And about a month later, I returned home to Cedar Rapids for the summer. Sometimes I would wonder about the two ducks, but mostly I worked and did teenager-on-summer-break things. That fall, I searched in vain for Pinhead and The Basketball duck, but I never saw them after that spring. I like to think that they found a home somewhere where the mallards wouldn't pick on them. Most likely, they ended up Peking or a l'orange.
A couple of years ago, the Cartoon Network ran a show called "Two Stupid Dogs." The main character were a scrappy weiner dog who always got his ass kicked, and a gigantic white enforcer of a sheepdog. Everytime the promo would announce, "two stupid dogs," I would yell, "Two stupid ducks!" instead. It made me feel better.
