“When it hurts to look back, and you’re scared to look ahead, you can look beside you and your best friend will be there.”
Anonymous
There’s nothing like surgery to make you humble and disabuse you of the notion that there is any aspect of your life that is private or particularly dignified.
I was in the hospital recently for a tune-up and one of those “bread and butter” operations that are so common that nobody pays them much attention, or worries about them beforehand. I figured I’d be up and hanging a new back door within a day or two.
Ten days later I’m on the mend, but still sitting around the house in my pajamas, racking up frequent flyer miles in my La-Z-Boy. My wife is outside chipping ice off the deck so the dogs can get to the backyard and attend to nature. This afternoon, she’s promised to go to the market and get me absolutely any kind of junk-food snack I want so I’ll have stuff to nibble on while I watch the Super Bowl.
If nothing else, having that much quiet time on your hands gives you ample opportunity to think about life’s great issues, and as Valentine’s Day approaches, one of the things I’ve been thinking about is marriage and how the reality of a long-term partnership is very different than what you imagined in the starryeyed first blush of romance.
I wonder, for example, how many of those young couples gazing lovingly into each other’s eyes know that if their marriages last long enough, there’ll come a day when one of them is helping the other attend to the most basic needs, like hobbling into the bathroom. And that’s probably the easy part.
I’ve read a lot of columns over the years wherein the writer opines at length about what makes a good marriage, but I’ve decided that in the final analysis there’s only one crucial component, and it is simple:
The person you marry must also be your best friend.
If you can say that going in, I suspect your marriage will live long and prosper. You’ll have the strength to help each other through the trying times and heartbreaks the years will bring. If you can’t, you ought to save your friends the trouble of navigating your registry at Crate & Barrel and spend all that money you’ve saved for your wedding on a singles cruise to Jamaica.
It sounds simple, but I believe it’s true. So here’s to my best friend on Valentine’s Day. Roses and chocolates to follow.
I got a real kick out of a story in the North/South Brunswick Sentinel last week that South Brunswick has renewed its agreement with the U.S. Department of Agriculture for goose control.
Like in almost every other municipality in the state, these pests have overrun South Brunswick for years, and everything they’ve tried has failed miserably.
They tried using trained collies to chase the geese away, and it worked as long as they sicced the dogs on ’em several times a week. But as soon as they turned their backs, or the money to pay for the dogs ran out, the critters came back. The dogs hadn’t chased them very far, after all, and certainly didn’t pose enough of an inconvenience to cause the geese to light out for Florida, or wherever their migratory cousins go in the cold months.
The township built windmills on a couple of ponds, on the theory that the shiny windmills would convince the geese to move along to North Brunswick, or East Brunswick, and supplemented the windmills with noise cannons.
No dice.
The current USDA program uses what is called “nest management.” That means that around the end of March when geese are nesting and laying eggs, USDA employees get out into the field to find the nests, where they addle the eggs by shaking them. Addling kills the embryo inside, so it won’t hatch into another goose to poop on the grass.
As a birth control method for geese, addling is pretty effective,
but it has drawbacks.
First, geese are territorial and defend their nests tenaciously. Egg addlers need to go with another person or a dog to defend themselves from attacking geese, thus increasing the manpower requirements for the process.
Second, you’ve got to have enough addlers on the job to locate all or most of the nests if you’re going to reduce the population significantly.
The story didn’t say how many egg addlers would be on the job in South Brunswick. But since the township only expects to pay between $2,000 and $3,000 on the whole program, you’ve got to figure it won’t be an army.
Success requires time and commitment, and even if nest control is successful in South Brunswick, there’s nothing to stop geese from surrounding communities from moving in to fill the recently vacated space.
So it’s my prediction addling will do about as much to solve the problem in South Brunswick as windmills.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. Even though they taste a bit like mud, I say the federal government and the New Jersey Division of Fish & Wildlife should designate Canada geese a nuisance and declare open season on them. They ought to tell people that for the next sixmonths, folks can just fill their freezers with geese. Either that, or have qualified hunters go out and do it for us.
We limit bear populations in New Jersey with controlled hunts, and for my money, geese are amuch larger nuisance than bears. The government says there are about 80,000 Canada geese in New Jersey, but there are more each year. Each goose excretes about a half pound of droppings a day, so at the government’s estimate of 80,000 geese in the state, that’s 40,000 pounds of goose bombs a day to pollute the water and slide around in. It ain’t healthy, to say the least.
Realistically, there’s no other solution. If we want tomake a serious reduction in the number of geese around here, there just isn’t a nice way to do it.
We’ve got to terminate the buggers.
Gregory Bean is the former executive editor of Greater Media Newspapers. You can reach him at [email protected].