I worked with a lot of characters in my twenty-four years at the Chicago Grain Exchange. No shortage of wheeler dealers there. If you asked some of these guys to give you a market, they’d make you one. Infrequently traded futures months? No problem! Uncommonly traded commodity spreads? No problem! Where will you do Oct. / March? They’d reply without hesitation, without a breath. Buy it 1.90, sell you at 2.10. Although some guys would suck in a huge breath, think and exhale with their cheeks puffed out, thinking, thinking. . . “Buy it a buck seventy, sell you twos.”
I wonder what some of these guys would say if I told them I couldn’t wait for the geese and duck season to start. That’s right, overnight at work, on the graveyard shift, I harkened back to the late winter / early spring of last year around the end of April where this female duck had taken squatter’s rights on the boat. (“Buy 40 degree temps, sell you 20s at 12 and a 1/4.”) I was thinking because it was so unseasonably warm this year that perhaps I’d see the miracle of nature again this year and I realized I was being impatient. March / April is pretty far away as of today’s date.
After all, we just had our second snowfall of the season in all actuality and winter is definitely not finished yet. But from my vantage point where I sit all night I can see the very place the female duck from last year laid her eggs and hatched a few, too. I know it’s a bit early to be thinking about it but I’ve got to wonder if I’ll be as tied up again as I was in the miracle of life as I was last year. (“April! Buy geese sell ducks at a quarter!”) The 2011 female duck. First living on the boat, waddling around, hiding from the green-headed male ducks (or drakes, perhaps) who were sowing their springtime wild oats – if memory serves me she had a clump of feathers missing from her head, the poor dear. (“Buy feathers, sell you a little knitted duck hat your mom crochets for a dollar! What’s the over under on how many ducklings hatch?”)
I took pictures, wrote and even told a whole mess of people about that spot I could see from where I sat last night, the spot the female moved to when she began laying her eggs. I feel bad about that, as if, each person making that walk from the pavillion to the boat would stop and check on her and draw about as much attention to her nest as I did. She was stalwart, steadfast in her instinct to stay atop that small group of eggs just as long as she could on a daily basis with the exception of finding food for herself I imagine, but she stayed; the pointing, the cmeres and come take a looks, the ohhs and ahhs notwithstanding: she did what mother ducks do. I just hope all the attention didn’t spook her.
I don’t know what caused the lack of baby ducks for this particular mama, I just know she was mauled and hiding for quite a while on the boat. After an eyewitness experience I had in just how drastic these drakes could be, I put two and two together and realized the missing clumps were from the males pinning the females down from the back with their ducks bills so that they could do the springtime duck mambo on the backs of these females. Better than You Tube or Facebook videos and better than Animal Planet or the Discovery Channel because I saw it with my own two eyes. (“Buy cable television, sell you the internet at 69! Sell it at 8”) Best education I ever received watching all this unfold from late March early April to June-ish of last year. The pain, the pathos! Better than All My Children! Just tremendous.
After having ultimately and sadly seen only 2 or 3 ducklings hatch from the dozen or so duck eggs, I saw, not long after that I saw another mama duckling swimming merrily upon the Fox River with somewhere between 7 to 9 ducklings following her in a group. How sorry I felt for the one who’s life I had a peek into during her mating, her pregnancy and her subsequent delivery. Once the last snows of the season begin to dwindle I wonder if I’ll see any of those female babies from last year using the boat as a safe haven, trying to evade the advances of the males who’ve matured also and watch them perhaps, sit upon their eggs. . .?
We shall see what we shall see. . . .
(“Buy the March duck eggs, sell you May ducklings @ the orders . . .”)
(Not that I’m a market player nor can I make you a market for anything you want, but definitely, without a doubt, I am, a character!)
Happy Playoff Sunday everyone!
MJC
Word Count: 824
This is your 883rd post.
