Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls

by David Sedaris

It was likely someone just road testing his new curse word—a little late too, as our end of the block had discovered it months earlier. “It means ‘female dog,’” I’d explained to my sisters, “but it also means ‘a woman who’s crabby and won’t let you be yourself.’”

It was only in competing that an activity became fraught and self-conscious. More accurately, it was only in competing with boys. I was fine against girls, especially if they were younger than me. Younger than me and physically challenged was even better. Give me a female opponent with a first-grade education and a leg brace, and I would churn that water like a speedboat. When it came to winning, I never split hairs.

Drawing attention to Gretchen’s weight was the sort of behavior my mother referred to as “stirring the turd,” and I did it a lot that summer.

There weren’t many people I truly hated back then—thirty, maybe forty-five at most—and Greg was at the top of my list.

I’m sure my father said plenty of normal things to me when I was growing up, but what stuck, probably because he said it, like, ten thousand times, was “Everything you touch turns to crap.” His other catchphrase was “You know what you are? A big fat zero.”

Their house had real hardcover books in it, and you often saw them lying open on the sofa, the words still warm from being read.

I drew the line at snakes, but anything else was brought home and imprisoned in our ten-gallon aquariums. Lizards, toads, baby birds: they all got the same diet—raw hamburger meat—and, with few exceptions, they all died within a week or two. “Menu-wise, it might not hurt you to branch out a little,” my mother once said, in reference to my captive luna moth. It was the size of a paperback novel, a beautiful mint green, but not much interested in ground chuck. “Maybe you could feed it some, I don’t know, flowers or something.” Like she knew.

The creature on TV—I can’t say male or female without bringing on a stomachache—said that when it was a woman it was attracted to men and that it still is. This means that now, on top of everything else, it’s a homosexual. As if we didn’t have enough already, some doctor had to go and make one!

In Japanese and Italian, the response to the final question is “I’m fine, and you?” In German it’s answered with a sigh and a slight pause, followed by “Not so good.” I mentioned this to my German friend Tilo, who said that of course that was the response. “We can’t get it through our heads that people are asking only to be polite,” he said.

“Would you like to step outside and feed him?” he asked. I wanted to say that between the wallaby and the baby doll, I was already overstimulated, but how often in life do you get such an offer? That’s how I found myself on the deck, holding a bowl of raw duck meat cut into slender strips. At the sight of it, the bird stood up and flew onto my arm, which buckled slightly beneath his weight. “Don’t be afraid,” the waiter said, and he talked to the kookaburra in a soothing, respectful voice, the way you might to a child with a switchblade in his hand.

What would strike me afterward was the innocence of it. If I had children and they stayed up late, singing a song about a bird, I believe I would find it charming. I knew I had those two for a reason, I think I’d say to myself. I might go so far as to secretly record them and submit the tape in a My Kids Are Cuter Than Yours competition. My dad, by contrast, clearly didn’t see it that way, which was strange to me. It’s not like we were ruining his TV reception. He couldn’t even hear us from that distance, so what did he have to complain about?

I guess what he resented was being dismissed. Had our mother told us to shut up, we’d probably have done it. He, on the other hand, sitting around in his underpants—it just didn’t seem that important.

He got me eventually, the first blows landing just beneath my knee caps. Then down I went, and he moved in on my upper thigh. Whap, whap, whap. And while it certainly hurt, I have to say that he didn’t go overboard. He never did. I asked him about it once, when I was around fourteen, and he chalked it up to a combination of common sense and remarkable self-control. “I know that if I don’t stop myself early I’ll kill you,” he said.

It wasn’t the same guy every time—one might be bald and wearing sunglasses, while another could have long sideburns and a lazy eye—but it happened in turn to all the Sedaris girls. They’d see a man their father’s age masturbating, and afterward they’d wander into the house, never hysterical but slightly dazed, as if they’d been stopped by a talking cat. I felt left out and remember asking my father why it never happened to me. “Well, think about it,” he said. “Exposing yourself to a girl is one thing. Doing it to a boy, though—the guy would have to be perverted.”

The young woman’s name was Jennifer, and it turned out that she worked for Helping Hands, an organization that trains monkeys to toil as slaves for paralyzed people.

“If you stepped out of the shower and saw a leprechaun standing at the base of your toilet, would you scream, or would you innately understand that he meant you no harm?”

Everyone was an expert, and what they all knew was this: Americans are racist.

I also appreciate that Americans wear campaign buttons—identifiers saying either “You and I are alike,” “I am a huge asshole,” or, in the case of a third-party nominee, “I don’t mind wasting my vote.” It makes everyone so wonderfully easy to pigeonhole. I only wish that the buttons could be larger, the size of plates, at least. That way you could read them from a greater distance and have more time to activate your scowl.

States vote to take away my marriage rights, and even though I don’t want to get married, it tends to hurt my feelings. I guess what bugs me is that it was put to a vote in the first place. If you don’t want to marry a homosexual, then don’t. But what gives you the right to weigh in on your neighbor’s options? It’s like voting on whether or not redheads should be allowed to celebrate Christmas.

Then the flight attendants, garbage bags in hand, glided down the aisle, looking each one of us square in the face and whispering, without discrimination, “Your trash. You’re trash. Your family’s trash.”

“You know,” I’ll say. “There’s something about nocturnal birds of prey that I just don’t get. If only there was somewhere I could turn for answers.” “I wish I could help you,” Hugh will say, adding, a second or two later, “Hold on a minute… what about… Understanding Owls?”

This was what I had grown accustomed to when we flew from Narita to Beijing Capital International, where the first thing you notice is what sounds like a milk steamer, the sort a café uses when making lattes and cappuccinos. That’s odd, you think. There’s a coffee bar on the elevator to the parking deck? What you’re hearing, that incessant guttural hiss, is the sound of one person, and then another, dredging up phlegm, seemingly from the depths of his or her soul. At first you look over, wondering, Where are you going to put that? A better question, you soon realize, is Where aren’t you going to put it?

“You know,” he said, “this country might have its faults, but it is virtually impossible to get a bad meal here.” I didn’t say anything.

Then there’s the tax business, which really makes my blood boil. The way it is now, if I win the lottery I’ll have to give the government a much higher percentage than I would have if I’d won it when Bush was in office.

Because the house was Grade II listed, broken windows could be replaced but not double-paned, as that would keep out the historic cold.

While the builders worked on the cottage, Hugh lived in what used to be the stable but was later converted into a guesthouse, the kind you’d have if you wanted to either discourage guests or contain them in one spot while slowly depressing them to death.

Once, I found a stroller with the seat burned out, this as if the child had spontaneously combusted.

I tell myself that it’s possible sometimes, though deep down I suspect it’s just rubbish.

Daaaaaaaamn, a whole story just to end in a pun. Well done, David. Well done.

“The sandbox!” my sister Amy said at the time. “Don’t you realize that children have to pee in there?”

I’ve become like one of those people I hate, the sort who go to the museum and, instead of looking at the magnificent Brueghel, take a picture of it, reducing it from art to proof. It’s not “Look what Brueghel did, painted this masterpiece” but “Look what I did, went to Rotterdam and stood in front of a Brueghel painting!”

In one large cage lived a pair of ferrets and, next door, some long-haired guinea pigs. A woman and her two sons, aged maybe five and seven, spotted them at the same time I did and raced over to get a better look. The younger boy seemed pleased enough, but his brother went bananas. “Jesus!” he said, turning to look at his mother. “Jesus, will you look at those?”

There might have been a dozen things on it, but what caught my eyes and precluded them from advancing was the K-Y Jelly, which was stored in a tub the size of a bongo drum.

“I’m going to need for you to pass some gas,” said the woman putting papers into envelopes. She spoke as if she were a teacher, and I was a second-grade student. “Do you think you can do that for me?” “For you, anything.” And as I did as I was instructed, I realized it was no different than playing a wind instrument. There were other musicians behind other curtains, and I swore I could hear them chiming in, the group of us forming God’s own horn section. I’m not sure how long I lay there, blissed-out and farting. Three minutes? Five? Ten? Then I was instructed to get dressed, and someone led me into a room with a newspaper and a Bible in it. There I was reunited with Lisa, who said joyfully, “Didn’t I tell you?”