ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

This is one of those rather depressing books that has a thoughtful and loving inscription from the original purchaser to the original owner, and then you buy it at a library sale for $0.50 two years later. Inside the front cover, someone named Mary Margaret has written “To Dick - My favorite ornithological protégé - read, smile and think of me. 1995″ Whatever else she may have been aside from an ostensible ornithologist, Mary Margaret knew her spelling, and is clearly a very proper person: she has correctly added both accent marks on the word that most of us would have skimped on and simply scripted as protege.

I tried, obviously without much success, to guess at Mary Margaret’s relationship with Dick. Signing with her name clearly suggests that she is not some senior relative such as a grandmother, mother or aunt, unless she is a serious hippie, which I doubt because her handwriting looks rather old-fashioned and conservative. So, if she is a relative, which I doubt because of the “think of me”, she must be a cousin or sister. I’m going to assume she is neither of those. That mostly leaves friend or girlfriend. In general, with an inscription like the one Mary Margaret has penned, I would automatically assume that she and this mysterious Dick were erstwhile lovers and after they parted, poor old Dick couldn’t bear to keep around this horrid reminder of Mary Margaret, his now inexistent interest in avian folk, and the way she read over his shoulder after gifting it to him, to make sure he was really reading and enjoying it.

But in the end I can only speculate as to the reason it turned up in the sale. Maybe he never liked it. Maybe Mary Margaret entered a convent, since with a name like that it’s practically the law anyway. Or maybe Mary Margaret ground her teeth every night for two years and eventually he couldn’t take it anymore and he ditched her and all the stuff she ever gave him except the toaster with extra wide slots for bagels.

Wherever Dick and Mary Margaret are now, I kind of wonder if they still talk. Did he get rid of the book because he didn’t like it and wanted to cut down on clutter although he was still quite fond of Mary Margaret herself? Or did they have a cataclysmic or “with a whimper” style falling out and now haven’t seen each other in nearly ten years except for occasional rare encounters in supermarkets and the like?

As for the book itself, it’s a humorous short bit with paragraphs giving tongue-in-cheek descriptions of a variety of bird species, one of which is the grey squirrel (page 11), about which it is noted that “if you put up a birdfeeder you will attract a large variety of birds, the most frequent and permanent of which will be squirrels.” I guess it’s worth a quick read, although frankly Dick and Mary Margaret are more interesting.