Things you may not know about prothonotaries

Every year we visit my wife's parents in Naples (Florida, not Campania), and every year we spend half a day going to Corkscrew Swamp, an Audubon preserve 45 minutes inland. Corkscrew after days of beach and sun is like salad after the main course or cheese with apple pie, a contrast that refreshes the senses, revives desire, and satisfies the craving for complexity in the universe.

This year we saw Painted Buntings, a baby raccoon, a Ghost Orchid so high up in a faraway tree that it had to be viewed through a high-powered monocular on a tripod, bear shit, a baby alligator, and a giant alligator that surfaced silently from the algae on the pond in front of us. But the best thing we saw was a Prothonotary Warbler.

Prothonotary Warblers aren’t rare, but they are difficult to see because they forage in dense foliage low to the ground. Even bird-watchers and ornithologists get excited when they see one, and Alger Hiss’s boast of having sighted a Prothonotary Warbler became, for HUAC, one of the facts that linked him to Whittaker Chambers.

Now, unless you’re tragically incurious, drugged, or dead, you of course want to know what a prothonotary is. I’m glad you asked.

Prothonotaries were high-ranking civil administrators in the Byzantine Empire, 7th through 12th centuries. Prothonotaries still are high officials of the Roman Catholic Church, but they no longer wear the golden robes that give the warbler its name. In the Canadian federal courts, a prothonotary is a judicial officer with many of the powers of a judge. In Pennsylvania, Delaware, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island, the prothonotary is the chief court clerk, as he is in the Supreme Courts of the Australian states of New South Wales and Victoria.

Don’t worry if you’ve forgotten all of this by tomorrow. It is, after all, a random collection of facts held together by a 12.5-gram bird. And cravings for complexity are quickly sated. My 12- and 14-year old boys forgot the Prothonotary Warbler even faster than tomorrow, first decrying the depressing ugliness of inland Florida strip malls as we drove back from Corkscrew Swamp, then demanding that we stop at one for Dunkin’ Donuts.

I had a Chocolate Glazed Cake Donut and a Chocolate Kreme Filled Donut, and, many days later, I'm still wondering where the salad course is.

Pantywaist goes to hockey game

Once a year my brother-in-law gives the family tickets to a Wild game. We all look forward to it. Hockey is beautiful and exciting. Xcel is a great place to see a game. And the whole experience is other-worldly, not just being surrounded by space aliens, but actually visiting their planet.

This year, as usual, the four of us were the only people in the arena not wearing Wild paraphernalia. And this year, as usual, the greatest pleasure for the 12- and 14-year olds was eating the kind of food they don't get at home. Both boys were done with their Philly cheese steaks before the Star Spangled Banner began, and no, they didn't care that their sandwiches bore no relation to what's served in Philadelphia, or that the cheese glopped over it was mostly vegetable oil with artificial coloring.

A few minutes into the first period, there was a fight. Not a little fight, but the kind where the referees stand aside and let the two guys go at it. The St. Louis Blues player lost his helmet, so his head served as a punching bag for the Wild player. It was probably 60 seconds; it seemed like ten minutes. It was unpleasant.

Not so much because I expected the punchee to start bleeding from his ears and be carted off to die in some green-tiled, fluorescent-lit St. Paul emergency room. But because the crowd cheered every punch, standing and screaming with pleasure, so excited that they might even have spilled some of their beer.

"Watch out," you're thinking, "he's going to make a last-days-of-Rome reference." No I'm not. The cheering needed no tired similes; it was horrible enough on its own. The 12-year old, who spends every waking minute splattering the brains of opposing Call of Duty soldiers against the concrete block walls of nameless Eastern European cities, all the while chortling "head shot" into his headset, was visibly upset. He'd never seen real grownups really fighting, he didn't like it, and he particularly didn't like that thousands of people loved it. The 14-year old asked why they allowed it. "Because everyone loves it," I said, "look around you."

Oh well. The rest of the game was filled with dazzling skating and shot-making. The boys recovered sufficiently to each eat a pizza at the beginning of the second period. The Wild won. We all went home feeling we'd had a cultural adventure. We were exhausted in a good way and, at the same time, excited, so excited that we had huge fight in the car over how to pronounce Guayaquil.

Now there's something worth fighting over. I think if we'd been on skates, there might have been a death or two.

The rabbit in the back yard

I don't care how cute and furry they are, I hate rabbits.

They eat the garden. They're stupid, prone to dying needlessly under the wheels of cars because they freeze in terror, spreading guts and brains and blood and fur all over the road for the crows to clean up. They shit everywhere at will, leaving perfect and delicious Rabbit Trix for my Corgi (a big, manly Cardigan Corgi, by the way, not a small, overweight, sissy Pembroke Corgi) to hoover up endlessly, which is even more disgusting than rabbit bodies in the road. And rabbits breed like rabbits, producing adorable bunny treats for Alice the cat. Alice eats the whole baby, leaving only the skull for me to clean up and the scream of the dying innocent echoing in my ears.

So it was with dismay that I discovered we've acquired a resident rabbit who lives under our front porch. He was in our back yard every night this winter, eating like a king from our compost heap, where he can choose from the leavings of pears, apples, bananas, pineapples, kiwis, carrots, turnips, rutabagas, parsnips, cabbages both green and red, brussels sprouts, lettuces of all nations, cucumbers, tulips, lilies, and whatever else, all of it flash-frozen to preserve the flavor and nutrition, and decorated with a tasteful dusting of ridiculously expensive coffee grounds from Dunn Bros. With the exception of the root vegetables, it's a small lesson in the evils of the carbon-based economy: burn fossil fuels to transport food, instead of eating locally, and your rabbits will come home to roost.

Even worse, I've come to like him. I'm proud that he's bigger than any other rabbits I see in the alley. The whole family cuts those weird little black berries from the chokeberry bush for him to eat, then applauds when they're gone in the morning. And now that he spends a lot of time in our neighbors' yard, I worry that he's ok.

It can't end well. Spring is here, and he'll start to eat the garden, starting with the alpine strawberry plants that just yesterday appeared from under the ice. Or he'll cross the road looking for a mate and die and I'll have to watch his body decay while the crows carry away the juiciest pieces. Or he will turn out to have been she all along, and she'll have babies, and Alice will eat them, and I'll have to worry that she's sad.

Yeah, I know rabbits don't get sad. But this is my rabbit.