How could I forget?)Īs I read, plunging into a world both comic and caustic, ordinary life churns on. (I just recalled I own t-shirts from the Mütter and Evolution. The Mütter and Evolution are bustling tourist magnets, irresistible emporiums of the morbid and mortal, stocked with shocking notions and terrible beauty. Though I’ve since discarded my assortment of animal oddities, I love roaming the aisles and perusing the glass cases at the Mütter and the Evolution Store, gaping at furry and scaly taxidermy, jarred sharks, pickled human organs, and skulls of all species. Back then our main educational outlet for these things was TV’s “Wild Kingdom,” a show that pales woefully next to today’s über-slick “Planet Earth.” Yet it was good, eye-opening.Įven now, none of this bores me. It wasn’t callow mischief guiding us, but a dogged fascination with the slimy, squirmy world, our first real engagement with the natural sciences and coexistent creatures. At the beach, we collected sand crabs, starfish and washed-up egg sacks from sharks. My interest in this kind of fleshly ephemera goes back to when as kids we hunted lizards and snakes, captured frogs, tadpoles and the occasional crawfish. Those were the days when I maintained a kind of ghoulish cabinet of curiosities, an array of animal bits and pieces that you might see in a really good, icky museum, like the Mütter in Philadelphia or the Kunstkamera in St. “If by nuts you mean genius, then you are correct, amigo,” I replied. “You’re nuts,” a friend said, grimacing at my latest specimen. It looked like the baby floating in space at the end of “2001.” Then I filled the jar with rubbing alcohol as a cheap formaldehyde substitute to preserve the bird. I took a small, squat jar and dropped the creature in. I knew exactly what to do with the sad songbird that would never sing. I wrapped the freshly hatched corpse in a handkerchief, stuck it in my pocket, and took it home. It was impressively intact.Īfter a flush of shock and pity, I did what any sane person would do. Its livid, bulging eyelids were sealed, its featherless body as smooth as a plum. Gruesome and heartbreaking, about the size of a toddler’s palm, the chick bore hues of hot pink and bruised blue. Once I was strolling down the sidewalk in a small leafy city when I almost stepped on a dead baby bird.
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