BLACKIE

Blackie ruined my summer when I was ten years old. He seemed to appear out of nowhere one hot morning while the whole neighborhood was bouncing around on our Pogo Sticks. ( I think about ten of us got them for Christmas that year, and we all discovered that they were fun for about eight minutes.) Even when you got pretty good at it, jumping up and down and maybe moving about ten feet just didn't cut it for very long. Every once in awhile we'd all get them out and hop around for a few minutes just so our parents wouldn't think we were ungrateful. Barbara Sellers was a year or two older than most of us and she was tall with big black hair that stuck out from under her little red  cap. She was really good on her Pogo Stick, and would still be hopping around when the rest of us were all sitting on the curb chewing pieces of long grass.

Out of the blue Blackie appeared....a really big black crow who watched Barbara for awhile from a nearby tree and then flew down and landed on her foot....which caused her of course to dismount...and made us all laugh. He sort of stuck around that whole day....making his crow noise...and just hanging out with us, either in a tree or walking around like a pet or something. I didn't pay too much attention to him at first...but after a while he became sort of a nuisance, and we'd try to shoo him away when we were trying to play hop scotch or a board game under Mrs Winters big shade tree. Blackie's mood quickly turned ugly, and he got louder and more persistent...trying to horn in on everything we did.

After a couple of days Blackie's mood further deteriorated as we became less and less intrigued by his antics, and he suddenly began to swoop down on our heads from out of nowhere. Susan and her sister Mimi who were what might be described as "fragile" started the real chaos (now as I think back) because they were the ones who started screaming "BLACKIE ! " when they'd spot him in the trees while we were busy building an Indian campfire or something. Now Blackie must have gotten a big kick out of the screaming and consequent scattering of the group, because he began to dive bomb and screech even louder as he attacked the tallest person in our little gang. Fortunately  for the rest of us that was usually Barbara, with her red hat and wild black hair being his primary target.

In a matter of weeks I no longer participated in any of our regular summer activities unless I was confident that Barbara was there, and I could count on Blackie to attack her....and not me. Blackie was an unusually clever crow, with his own twisted sense of humor. Sometimes he'd be nowhere to be seen, and we'd almost forget about him while we played follow the leader on our bikes, only to get just far away from our front yards for Blackie to come tearing out of the trees...screeching like a banshee...and we'd ALL start to scream while poor Barbara would try to steer with one hand and protect her head with the other as we raced to safety. ( We'd already discovered that if we ran into someone's open garage he'd fly right in with us and continue to flap around and try to land on our heads.)

Many a sultry summer night I'd lie awake thinking (worrying) about Blackie. It got to the point that if Barbara wasn't already outside with the kids when I'd look out my bedroom window, I'd stay in. I'd taken particular notice over the preceding weeks of all of my friends' heights...and determined...much to my dismay...that I was the next tallest kid. Without Barbara as my ace in the hole, I'd surely be attacked. One day when I was actually brave enough to venture into the woods to check out our newly constructed shack while Barbara was in Ocean City for a week...my theory proved to be correct. Susan and Mimi started screaming their warning....everybody ran.....and I froze. So did Blackie. I figured that the standoff couldn't last forever....but it almost did. For what felt like eight or ten hours but was probably about two...( it really did start to get dark) I stood motionless while Blackie sat motionless on a big tree branch. I promised God that I'd become a priest or something if He'd resolve the situation, and also considered whether or not I could survive an attack if I made a break for it...and decided to wait him out. After a really long time he actually made some strange sound that probably meant something like "oh for God's sake" in crow, and he flew away...disgusted.

That whole summer was a write-off. I lived in terror of that crow, didn't mind rainy days, and went back to school as white as a ghost. To this day when I sit on my back porch with Woof and I hear a crow...I think of Blackie. who just flew away one day and never came back. Woof seems to notice crows too...and I swear she feels a sense of relief because she knows I'm a lot taller than she is.