The old gum tree

I'm going to start with a disclaimer: David Sedaris is, perhaps, not for everyone.

But I love the fellow! He makes me laugh out loud. Literally! I read his essays in the New Yorker & then again when he publishes a bunch of them as a book. When I read this one last week, I was chuckling loudly in many places, like this one:

I thought back to the previous summer, and my twenty-three-hour flight from London to Sydney. I was in Australia on business, and because someone else was paying for the ticket, and it would be possible to stop in Japan on the way home, Hugh joined me. This is not to put Australia down, but he’d already gone once before. Then, too, spend that much time on a plane and you’re entitled to a whole new world when you step off at the other end—the planet Mercury, say, or, at the very least, Mexico City. For an American, though, Australia seems pretty familiar: same wide streets, same office towers. It’s Canada in a thong, or that’s the initial impression.

Canada in a thong. That's funny. But probably not funny to Canada. Or Australia.

Sedaris continues the essay with a strange (of course!) scene at an Australian restaurant:

I watched the hostess seat a party of eight. Bringing up the rear was a woman in her mid-thirties, pretty, and with a baby on her shoulder. Its back was covered with a shawl, but to judge from the size it looked extremely young—a month old, tops.

Keep it away from the chef, I thought.

A short while later, I noticed that the child hadn’t shifted position. Its mother was running her hand over its back, almost as if she were feeling for a switch, and when the top of the shawl fell away I saw that this was not a baby but a baby doll.

“Psssst,” I whispered, and when Pat raised her eyes I directed them to the other side of the room.

“Is that normal in Australia?” I asked.

“Maybe it’s a grieving thing,” she offered. “Maybe she lost a baby in childbirth and this is helping her to work through it.”

There’s a definite line between looking and staring, and after I was caught crossing it I turned toward the window. On the highest rail of the deck was a wooden platform, and standing upon it, looking directly into my eyes, was what I knew to be a kookaburra. This thing was as big as a seagull, but squatter, squarer, and all done up in earth tones, the complete spectrum from beige to dark walnut. When seen full on, the feathers atop his head looked like brush-cut hair, and that gave him a brutish, almost conservative look. If owls were the professors of the avian kingdom, then kookaburras, I thought, might well be the gym teachers.

When the waitress arrived, I pointed out the window and asked her a half-dozen questions, all of them fear-based. “Oh,” she said, “that bird’s not going to hurt anybody.” She took our orders and then she must have spoken to one of the waiters. He was a tall fellow, college age, and he approached our table with a covered bowl in his hands. I assumed that it was an appetizer, but it seemed instead that it was for the kookaburra. “Would you like to step outside and feed him?” he asked.

I wanted to say that between the wallaby and the baby doll I was already overstimulated, but how often in life do you get such an offer? That’s how I found myself on the deck, holding a bowl of raw duck meat cut into slender strips. At the sight of it, the bird stood up and flew onto my arm, which buckled slightly beneath the weight.

“Don’t be afraid,” the waiter said, and he talked to the kookaburra in a soothing, respectful voice, the way you might to a child with a switchblade in his hand. For that’s what this thing’s beak was—a serious weapon. I held a strip of raw duck, and after yanking it from my fingers the bird flew back to the railing. Then he took the meat and began slamming it against his wooden platform.Whap, whap, whap. Over and over, as if he were tenderizing it.

“This is what he’d do in the wild with snakes and lizards and such,” the waiter said. “He thinks it’s still alive, see. He thinks he’s killing it.”

The kookaburra must have slammed the meat against the wooden platform a good ten times. Only then did he swallow it, and look up, expectantly, for more.

I love the line about asking the waitress questions, all of them fear-based.

Hmmm ... after quickly rereading this post I can tell that I have not adequately conveyed the humor that is David Sedaris' writing. And yet, I don't think I want to fully convey it in this forum. If you think David Sedaris might offend you - and there' s a good chance - stay away from his writing. But if his lilting lispy voice speaks to you, then you know where to find more laughs.