Peter Randazzo is a history teacher in upstate New York, but when he isn't teaching you can find him playing rugby, hiking, composing music, or working on his poetry and stories.
He runs the No Poet Peach blog and has published with The Word’s Faire, The Feast, Eber & Wein, Hidden in Childhood, and has self-published Dandelions & The Right Notes on Amazon.
Waddling Around the Jaws
By Peter Randazzo
The ducks lined the waters, ready for a frontal attack. The head commander unflinchingly stared up the shoreline at the gruesome beast tied to its cinder block. All of life and death was balanced with fragility between the rocky shore and the lapping lakefront as the smell of lillies and the buzzing of cicadas marked the battlefield.
The head mallard quacked with a gaunt reminder of mortality and a tickling love of homeland. His fearless flock watched him waddle towards the fanged monster, wings outstretched, tongue ululating a cry of eternity as its webbed feet boldly took hold of the gravel, warning all of his brutality in warfare.
The beast lunged, a bolt of lightning, an unseen blur, screaming towards this defiant fowl. The leash went taut, the cinderblock skirted slightly forward, and the sharply lined jowls of the hound snapped shut just out of reach of this mallard warrior.
The dog was yanked backwards from the shortness of the leash and the brave duck stood its ground. It folded its feathers and turned to its warriors, laughing. Our sore-necked dog cowered in shame.
The flock at once saw no threat in our clearly pathetic dog, as they waddled around him, seeing us campers not as invaders but as givers of bread, servers of wheat; free lunch.
It was July in 2010 and as we set up our campground in the Poconos, I watched my father, a thick, sweating, Italian hunk of a man unfurrow from the balled stress of family vacation into the surreality of peace and calm. He cackled, with cruelty, at the dog’s shame and inability to frighten this king-quacker. My mother looked on, a smile leaking onto her freckled lips as she saw this man, a knot of high standards, a glacier of cold perfection, melt into his true self: a joyful father.
It was a pattern of every school year, my father, the band director of excellence, a man of three hundred pounds of muscle, pasta, and expectation, would spool from his pimply, voice-cracking students a golden thread woven from love, fear, hope and possibility, pulled from their very souls as he built them from indifferent teenagers into award-winning musicians. He wept for them annually as they walked forward into the vast danger of life, a shield hammer-forged from his strict love and belief in them protecting them eternally.
But it was with high cost that this protection was formed. My mother, the mender of souls, the philosophy professor at the same school, wielded the sword of curiosity and kindness. It was only through her patient teaching and soft words, that the fireball of my father could cool into the puddle of joy and love which truly sloshed in his soul. It was she who urged these annual camping trips to create this great calming.
It was right then that the stress of the long year, long drive, and the hot sun had evaporated with the sharp snap of a dog leash and a brave duck. In the vivacious waddling around the jaws, the ducks had brought my father to our shire: a shady copse of trees along a lake in Pennsylvania where the fearsome giant fee-fi-fo-fuming shrank into human form.
“Peter,” he said. I felt the love trilling like the flute section, harmonizing with the soft swaying of the leaves, crooning with the bullfrogs hidden in their muck-homes. “Get the bread.”
My mother placed the camp-chairs in a row for sitting. The ducks approached, knowing their tax-collection was justified. Our dog reclined ashamedly beneath my father’s chair.
In the exhale of summer, we fed the king mallard and his band of warriors. We sponged in the great release, eternity dancing in the beads of sweat rolling down my father’s forehead, the jaws of death and worry just out of reach as we waddled into summer together.