‘I really have to stop now’, I thought on Wednesday morning. Bittersweet melancholy crept into my heart and squeezed it. I gasped. Such a determined resolution to a painful but inevitable goodbye, you only feel it a few times in your life. When you break up with what once seemed like a great love. When you leave a country where you have lived for years. When you finally really quit smoking. All in the realization: ‘It’s terrible, but it has to be.’
I’m going to stop feeding the ducks. Of course I already knew: it is no longer possible. Bread is bad for ducks. Very bad. You might as well feed them a pack of cigarettes. And rats thrive on that excess. (I don’t mind rats at all, they are sweet and smart animals, but I realize I’m pretty much alone in this.)
Tuesday it was again extensively in the newspaper, and I finally found the strength to take the plunge. Finished. As the cardiologist told a friend of mine who had just survived a heart attack, “You’re not going to quit smoking. You’ve already quit smoking.’
I thought sadly of better times. For some people their dog is their most loyal friend, for me it was the ducks. Ducks don’t judge. They were always happy to see me. I could lose the most horrible secrets with my ducks. ‘Listen, ducklings,’ I would say, and softly told what was on my heart.
‘Goodbye, lady with the bicycle and the bag with the bread,’ they would chatter. ‘Ploe plom! Goodbye lady with the bread! Goodbye bread in the bag! Good day dear woman! Goodbye little lady my!’ And I just sprinkle, as a thank you. Multigrain, sourdough, a withered croissant, a stale rusk. Oliebollen in January. (Young lettuce in September.)
I always sprinkled it with the utmost care. No half loaves of bread in that pond at once, no, I tore every bam into beak-ready pieces (also some extra small ones, for the coots). That one lame duck always got his share. The crumbs were for the pigeons.
“But the perishable knows no time/ But in the resurrection of memories;/ Yesterday is as distant as these things:/ In the past time is no more.” JC Flour muttered in my ear. “Say, stop it,” I snapped. He tossed another “bye, by, oh and gone” at it and trudged out of my kitchen.
In the lunch box I found two old currant buns.
Just one more time, to unlearn it?