A Cellarful of Nose - Future Shoes

Liz and Artie looked like they had a lot on their plate, and did
not really need a brash youth to enliven things. Lizzie was
depressed and anxious, not having taught English in some years.
Art was still depressed from being blacklisted a decade earlier for
speaking out against the McCarthy hearings. Blacklisting cost
him his aerospace job in booming San Mateo. His free speech
cost them their membership in the middle class.
They made me a sandwich and we talked. I burned their ears
with tales of reckless living, communing with flakes and gurus,
and hitching around filling thick notebooks with bad poems. My
hosts, whom I expected to be rebels like myself, only frowned.
Aunt Liz showed me around her ornamental crabs, her tea
roses, and a single radiant pear tree by the pump house, loaded
down with golden oblong fruit.
She also raised birds. Her yard was a moving carpet of ducks
and drakes, geese and ganders, and peacocks and peahens. She
picked up one duck, named Daffy, and explained that Daffy was a
genuine hermaphrodite – one day he/she just changed sexes, went
from female to male. That made Daffy special.
She also had chickens, but not your usual barnyard chickens.
They were exotic crimson-crested chickens from China, raised
not for meat, but for "100-year eggs" that were buried
underground and allowed to molder, then dug up and sold for
special holidays. They smelled to high heaven, but were an
indispensable delicacy at Chinese New Year. Rotten eggs helped
paid the bills.
But we couldn't get along. They were suffering, and I was
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