You see it in the movies. You read about it in books. And yet, when it happens to you, you're never quite prepared for it.
I blame the snowstorm.
The snow was coming down hard - harder than I was comfortable with. I have only lived in Manchester for a few months, but even I have an idea of how difficult it is to find a parking spot downtown on a weekday and in the middle of a storm, so I decided to walk to the library to do my research.
I put on my gigantic green snowboots, the ones with the bright yellow laces. I knew they looked surreal, but I wanted any snowbank I ran across to think twice before messing with me. I put on my warmest jacket - it's old now and pretty tattered, but it's down-filled and wouldn't show the salt that would almost certainly be splashed onto me from the roads as they were being plowed.
I also decided to wear my warm hat -the one with the earflaps. I figured that the odds of actually meeting an attractive woman during this walk were relatively low and if I did, she would presumably be looking down at her feet instead of into the blowing snow, so I'd have time to whip off the hat if I needed to.
As I made my way up Chestnut Street toward the library, my attention was grabbed, as it always is, by one of the homeless guys who feed the pigeons in Victory Park. He was almost invisible under the huge, fluttering, undulating cloud of birds that swarmed around him. It was fairly easy to tell he was there, however, because he was carrying on a long, detailed diatribe. I couldn't quite make out who he was arguing with, but he was quite animated in his opinions. I sighed with sympathy as I trudged past him. Who knows what he'd gone through to reach this point in his life? I counted my blessings and moved on to the library.
As it turns out, I had a lot more research to do than I'd originally planned on. I ended up checking out four large reference volumes and, for reasons we don't really need to go into here, a large impressionist painting. The very nice lady at the checkout desk asked if I'd like a plastic bag to protect the books from the snow and that seemed like a good idea, so I accepted.
So there I was, back outside the library, trudging through the storm in my ludicrous boots, parka and hat, schlepping a large, plastic grocery bag, my highly attractive Keene Sentinel 200th Anniversary tote-bag and a large impressionist painting. I decided to save myself a block or so of walking and cut through the park.
I suspect it was the plastic bag that actually drew the pigeons to me. Think about it from their perspective - if they see someone like that, carrying a completely inappropriate piece of furniture AND holding just exactly the kind of bag that they are usually fed from, of COURSE they are going to assume that they have earned an extra snack.
Take it from me, you don't want to be attacked by pigeons. One moment, I was walking along, minding my own business - the next, I was in the middle of an Alfred Hitchcock movie. To my credit, I didn't panic. It was only as the three or four hundredth pigeon tried to land on me that I started yelling at them. "Hey! Pigeons! This is not for you! This is for me! Go away!"
By the time I finally got across the park, I was yelling conspiracy theories and the well-dressed people on the street were avoiding direct eye contact with me.
