My dad and I were going to a White Sox game. Not just a Chicago thing to do. But a south-side Chicago thing to do. A two fisted thing. I’m ten or eleven years old. Happy to be going to see some baseball, get some hot dogs, hang out with my dad.

Then as we’re waiting for a light on a tree-lined street I see a tufted titmouse in a tree. I never saw one ‘til then. And I say, hey, a titmouse.

My dad thinks all birds are called birds. Period. Maybe some are called chickens or turkeys, and I guess he’d know an eagle on a quarter, but he doesn’t get into it more than that.

“A what mouse?” He says.

I’d recently studied birds in school so I knew the different kinds and knew this was a tufted titmouse. A little chickadee with a crest on its head. Don’t ask me why, but I remembered it and thought it was cool to see one.

That day was the beginning of my being teased about birds.

Sure, I liked making my dad laugh. It wasn’t easy. What could a little kid say that was funny enough to make a grown-up laugh? But this did it.

Titmouse. He laughed a belly laugh on that car trip. And later telling this to family and friends: “Hey, we saw a titmouse today.” Laugh, laugh.

Then whenever I went hiking in woods or on vacations to nature-heavy resorts like Starved Rock State Park, I’d get: hey, going to look for some tit-mice, are you?

As a kid this embarrassed me. I knew full well what tits were, the kind guys talked about in schoolyards. The kind I really wanted to see.  But that wasn’t a family subject, tits.

I guess his derision of my interest in tits, the bird names, contributed to my becoming a little defensive about bird watching. Hence, the whole two-fisted thing which might be a bit of an over-compensation for feeling like a bird nerd as a kid. Well, so be it.

In America we have the tufted titmouse and maybe one other kind, a western titmouse. But in England and Europe they have birds just plainly called tits.

There’s the blue tit and others like that. Also, let’s not forget the great tit. I looked for this bird on a trip to Europe. So I could come back from a hike and say, “Saw a couple of great tits today.” But I didn’t see them and couldn’t say that.

Now, let’s not forget that there are also birds named boobies. Blue-footed booby, red-footed, etc. Tits and boobies. Is this a great hobby for guys or what?

By the way, the team playing the White Sox that day? The Baltimore Orioles. On the south side of Chicago those words had only one definition, even to me. Freakin’ ball players.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 15th, 2009 at 8:57 pm and is filed under "Stories". You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.