Episode 30: Junior's Menagerie

Junior has a range of pets that come and go over the years, including a raccoon, a skunk and a crow. The racoon develops a taste for beer that leads to Junior having to chain the refrigerator door shut and secure it with a padlock. The racoon likes to reach in and grab a beer, open it, and then drink it and spray it around the kitchen as he swings back and forth on their refrigerator door. Ordinarily this would not make any impact on the state of the kitchen, but perhaps the sheer waste of beer gets to Junior.

The skunk has been deodorized and quickly finds a handy place for itself in a hole in Junior’s living room wall. Soon, it is roaming throughout the house within the walls at all hours. Apparently, they never know when and where he will turn up, scratching at the inside of a wall.

The crow is more neighborly and shows up frequently on our back stoop. He sits on the metal pipe banister and either sharpens his beak or makes eyes at us. We shower him with treats, until one afternoon, my mother is gathering her nylons in from the drying rack on the stoop.

“Hmm. I could have sworn I put six stockings out here. I must be getting old,” she muses.

A few days later, Mom catches the crow in the act of gathering her nylons on the rack. As she lunges for the stockings, he flies away with them trailing behind him back to Junior’s yard, where he lands on a tree limb and caws in defiance. From that moment forward, he is crow non grata.

There's no photo of the crow stealing my mother's

stockings, but crows are well known thieves, especially

of shiny objects.

Decades later, my husband and I are visited frequently by a crow we call Cromwell. One evening, I had just set the table on the deck, rolling the silverware into napkins and setting them next to plates. When I got inside I turned back to see Cromwell grab the corner of a napkin and give it a shake. The cutlery came flying out and Cromwell grabbed the knife. I ran out to yell at him; he must have been flustered because he dropped the knife before he cleared the fence.

There is another crow in our lives. Jake finds a baby crow in the woods and brings it home. When it’s young, my mother tries to divert it as it blunders into the kitchen from its cage on the back porch while learning to fly, invariably headed for an open cupboard filled with glass jars.

Dad builds a large cage outside for the bird. They let it out to fly about and it always comes back. Until the day it doesn’t when it flies away in front of guests

Three days after it leaves, there is an account in The Washington Post about a crow landing on a policeman’s shoulder in Bethesda.