My friend was notorious during her younger years for having a bit of a dicy record when it came to things like accidents. It’s not that she was clumsy, really, just accident prone to an alarming degree. Happily, she has since shown marked improvement. By that I mean she no longer injures herself in frequent and bizarre ways. Anywhoo, the small town where our university was located had this great town park. Actually, it really was a nifty little park that I didn’t think I’d miss until it was gone, but I digress. There was a lake with walking trails, picnic areas, fishing docks. It even had a carousel, mini-golf, and a train ride during the summer months. Ooh, and there was a snowcone stand and a swimming pool, and it was grassy and shady and......sorry. You don’t know what it’s like to miss trees until you live in the desert. But again, I digress. Okay, so this park also had a type of zoo thingy. Well, it was really a pen with a chain link fence that held an odd and various assortment of animals. Mostly deer, a couple of llamas, and a few donkeys. That sort of thing. It was supposed to be the home of a small flock of peacocks, but they had long since flown the coop (literally) and roamed the park at will, shrieking at everyone with that horrible call that will scare the ever-loving punk out of you if you’re not expecting it.

          Okay, so the park was a great place to hang and it’s usually crowded until the middle of winter. Don’t forget, this is small town Oklahoma we’re talking about, so crowded is a relative term. Crowded enough to usually annoy me, at least. The park road circled the lake completely and it was pretty ---the scenic route-- so we even relieved boredom by driving around the damn thing as if we hadn’t graduated from high school dragging at all. Well, my friend was putting in some driving-and-thinking time one afternoon when one of the peacocks literally jumped into the middle of the road so fast that she had no possible way of avoiding it. (So she says, but I wonder if she didn’t just get momentarily distracted by the guys playing basketball shirtless). Either way, she swerved to avoid the bird, ran off the road, and crashed into a guard post. Busted the headlight, dented the car a bit, but she was (mostly) unharmed. The peacock even lived, but it was a close call and he probably felt the need to prioritize and rethink his direction in life. So, other than a minor headache from having to recount the episode to her father and a rather fierce grudge against the peacock population, she came home relatively unscathed. That’s when things started to get odd.

          A few days after the first near-miss, my friend, driving through the park with witnesses this time, ran a-fowl (sorry) of yet another maniacal bird. Or maybe it was the same one and recognized her car. We’ll never know. Needless to say, she was miffed. I can’t clearly remember if any damage was done to the car this time, but she didn’t care. Those peacocks were clearly on her hit list. For the next few weeks, she would get this homicidal glint in her eye when anyone mentioned going to the park and we noticed that she seemed to volunteer her driving services more often than usual. And you know what? Those darn peacocks actually did leap out at her car. I’m sure there was a vast conspiracy involving avian walkie-talkies and smoke signals, because they seemed to know when she was coming and braced themselves for the event. The war had begun. By the end of the month, my friend no longer felt any urge to go to the park. Hell, she rarely felt an urge to drive anywhere, so convinced was she of her imminent death by critter, like something out of an Alfred Hitchcock movie.

          Then one day, while driving near her home over half an hour away from the scene of the original peacock assaults, she ran into one of their field agents. Or a few maybe, I can’t remember. She was driving down a lonely, unpopulated back country road when some rogue bird threw himself under her wheels. She again tried to swerve, probably more out of instinct this time than concern for the bird’s life. However, his blue-feathered luck had run out. She skidded on gravel, screamed, and plowed the poor birdie into roadkill. This upset my friend greatly, because she generally doesn’t enjoy slaughtering the wildlife needlessly. At least, she felt that way before the bird attacks. I personally think they’d just pushed her too far at last.

          So we naturally comforted and consoled her, which consisted of everyone snickering at any bird reference and making up any excuse to work the word peacock into a sentence. (Just try it, there are many ways and all of them are entertaining.) She eventually got over it, stopped having near collisions with the fauna --which pleased her poor dad who was paying for all the body work--and we all forgot about it completely.

          That is, until a few weeks ago when I get this message from her regarding peacocks. It seems that last month she was driving along, enjoying the day, when some creature yet again tried to commit suicide against her fender. She told me that her first instinct was to swing the wheel wildly and pray that the ditch was relatively soft and tree-free, but something stopped her. She closed her eyes, tightened her grip on the wheel, and let animal vs. machine deal with itself. She was not happy about this as she wished the little guy no harm in any way, but she was sure that she was going too fast to avoid him and trying to swerve would only result in painful doctor bills and more body work for her car. Or possibly no more car at all, depending on the ditch and all. When I ask her what it was that changed her mind, she replied that she could just hear her father’s response when she told him about the latest incident. In her head he was yelling “JUST HIT THE PEACOCK, FOR THE LOVE OF PETE!!” And you know what she told me?

          Sometimes, you just gotta hit the peacock. Words to live by, fellow sharers.