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Tom turkey
was a girl!!
07/06/2006 10:57 PM
Speaking of
Thursday, Sept. 2, that's Casey Speck's birthday. Our baby is getting to be an
old guy,
but don't tell him I called him a baby. He was born on Labor Day at Las Vegas,
Nev., over nine pounds. The doctor said he immediately ran down the hall looking
for something to eat! Having been born and raised in South Dakota I had a remedy
for his hungers ... we put him on com when he was four days old and threw away
the pacifier.
Speaking of com fed... Ed has a wonderful story
he likes to share on a fairly regular basis about a turkey in Duchesne, Utah. We
had these friends, Glen and Judy Mason, who raised turkeys. Now you know,
turkeys are these kind of big, clumsy things that are top heavy so (for them) a
high-wire act could be out of the question.
To make a long story short and still printable, this
old tom turkey was feeling quite amorous and Glen was aware of the balancing
problem Tom was having, which I suppose to some is quite funny in it-
self. Glen looked outside to check on Tom's progress and there, in front of God
and everyone was Old Tom, having his way with the object of his affection by
hanging on for dear life to the fence railing.
So you see, even in turkey life, where there's a will, there's a way!
We had a tom turkey, too. Tom was our pet. We lived on
an acre age with lots of cedar trees up
along the canal. We could go outside and yell "Tom," and he would respond with a
few gobbles and
come to us on a dead run. The thing about Tom was that Tom was a girl! And Tom
wanted babies so bad. One spring she found a horse turd to sit on and that old
girl sat on that turd from March to something like September (with occasional
periods of abandoning her nest.)
We even brought her some baby ducks one time. She was a
wonderful mother, but liked to have had a nervous breakdown. She would spread
her wings almost full circle to keep the little ducks underneath where it was
safe. They, on the other hand, had other ideas. They wanted the freedom to run
all around the yard. Once she recovered from the trauma of yet another failure
to be a mother, she simply returned to her horse turd.
When we moved home to Oacoma in May, 1978, Tom had her
own place in her cage in the cab of the U-haul truck. She must not have real
impressed with her new home because the first rainfall we had, she just turned
her head upward and committed suicide by drowning.
Well, that was kind of a sad ending. Do you sometimes
wonder how much of this stuff is fact or fiction? I guess as long as it remains
harmless prattle and takes your mind off the crappy things in
life. Strange that I should choose the "crappy" word, following a story about
turds. Enough.
You can just tell when I have nothing worthwhile to say
and am apparently just filling up my allotted space on page five, can't you? Oh
well, one of these days I won't be here and you're going to miss my mindless
prattle. Ya, right.
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