Still Smitten.

I once fell in love with a bird.
I wish I were kidding.
We met in Victoria, as in Vancouver Island.
I was on holidays, and she was living in the downtown zoo at the time.
I guess it was just one of those things, written in the stars and all.
We were destined to meet....

Earlier that day, my family and I, half a boatful of us actually, had gone whale-watching out on the Pacific. Have you ever done this? It is absolutely awe-inspiring. Plus, you get utterly drenched. It is wild fun.
The whale-watching outfit made us sign documents wherein we stated that if we died, hey, that was cool! Then they dutifully suited us up in these bright red rigamarole deals that were designed to keep water off of us.
Hah!
Very soon into the trip, I was convinced that we were only wearing these neon suits so that they can find us bobbing like apples when we go overboard! We were soaked through and through, and I don’t mean just externally, in the normal cracks and crevices. I mean on the inside too! Like spleen and liver soaked!
I think our boat-driver purposely hit the waves slantwise so that on our way out to where the whale pods were, all of us in the boat would have already tasted half the ocean! My niece was sitting in the row ahead of me, and all I know is that by the time our boat went into a calm neutral free float, I was wearing her mascara!
But wow!
There were the whales, sure enough. All over the place. “Breaching” as they do... launching themselves into the air around us. At one point, two whales surfaced and then rolled together, as though they were hugging, and then they submerged.
Our guide said “Well I’ll be danged” or something to that effect.
Then he explained to us that we had just witnessed a very rare sight indeed.
Two whales making out. Getting it on. Doing it old school.
Skinny dipping.
Two killers having whalecourse!

I mention all of this only to say that by the time we returned to the harbor and squelched ourselves out of this boat.... I was feeling quite romantic.
We walked around for a bit, drying off in the sun, and then ended up at this indoor zoo.
As we walked through, pausing momentarily before each exhibit to gawk at these poor caged-up beasts and whatnot.... I turned and saw.....
HER!
The toucan.
I was transfixed.
As I remember it, all peripheral sound dimmed! Just like in the movies. The Civil War can be raging three feet to either side of two characters... but because one of them happens to have a spear through his head, the other guy can all of a sudden hear him whispering his final words as if they were both sitting in a Starbucks. You know what I mean?
That’s what it was like, minus the gunfire and smoke!
It was just me and her. This bird and me.

She was in a huge-normous cage, and quietly eating.
It was a wordless, holy moment.
Speaking would have chased angels away.
So I just stared at her. And she stared at me, looking away now and then only to pick out a morsel of food about a foot distant, pick it up at the end of her gi-normous shnozz, and then flick it back into her mouth.
“Kissing would definitely be difficult” went through my mind, but true love quickly displaces such negative thoughts. Don’t you agree?
The rest of my family went squishing away on to other exhibits. To my knowledge, no one really noticed how smitten I was. If they did, they let me be. Maybe they whispered to each other, behind cupped hands... “He’s having one of his moments.”
I’ll never know.
But I stayed at that cage, by her side, until they made a circuit of the whole zoo. And then they came and pried my hands from her steely prison, and I left the place backwards.
Years later, I wrote the following poem for her. Not knowing her name, I titled it:

Toucan

Blue-rimmed eyes and black dress.
You were lunching. For the life of me
it looked like croutons
you were munching. Mixed with fruit.
Silent and beautiful. Wondrous,
the distance you tossed dinner
to your throat. So long
you had me staring.

Does it flatter you to know,
that after all these years,
I still remember
what you were wearing?

Nowadays, even seeing a Froot-Loops box can make me misty.
People... well-meaning people, have asked me, “How do you even know that she was a her?”
And I turn to them, almost in pity, and I say “Please. There are times when you look into the eyes and you don’t need to look anywhere else, to know who it is you are looking at.”