2 Geeks @ 3 Knots

Here’s a geeky fact: Mother’s Day itself is 100 years old. In 1914, president Woodrow Wilson signed a measure officially establishing the second Sunday in May as Mother’s Day. How to celebrate this centennial? Call your mother!! And let her extract all kinds of promises from you, like, you’ll always wear your pfd (of course!) and you’ll never do anything nutty like, oh, um, paddle in fog… Alex, Jim and Jean launch from HHYC at 6:30 a.m. and head to Marshlands Conservancy in Rye:

A foggy Saturday turned into a radiant Sunday. Our friend, Bea (a kayaking mom) joined us for a sunny afternoon on the Sound.

Jellyfish were EVERYWHERE!  Not a good sign, says Bea (a naturalist). Stay tuned… water today was 50 degrees F. These guys were all over our side of the Sound–like raw, orange, broken eggs…

Speaking of eggs… We 2geeks don’t have kids (maybe that’s why we get to paddle so much!) But if perception is reality, then Jean is indeed a mother… from Kuno’s point of view. Kuno is our African grey parrot/blog avatar. And yes, he thinks Jean is his mother! Here’s why: Twenty years ago, Jean visited a parrot breeder in Port Chester, NY, and plunked down a deposit on an egg. (Egg #159, to be exact.) Some weeks later, the breeder called. “Your egg hatched!” Jean brought the naked fledgling home, bonding with him by stuffing baby bird formula heated to precisely the right temperature via a syringe down his pink, featherless baby-bird throat several times a day. Very gently, of course.

After 20 years (BTW, his big decade “hatchday” was March 29), we’ve come to understand each other very well!  For example, every morning for 20 years, Kuno has supervised Jean’s applying makeup and ever-increasing gobs of eye wrinkle cream…

Each sunrise is greeted by the theme from The Andy Griffith Show, whistled from across the apartment. When Jean leaves in the morning, Kuno says “Gotta go tuh WORK!” and when she returns, a loud wine cork “pops.”  Opening the oven door sounds the “smoke alarm,” but looking at him seriously gets an innocent, Brooklynese “Birds can’t tawwwwk!”

Our 12-mile Mother’s Day paddle ended by treating ourselves—and of course, Kuno—to take-out from Coromandel, our favorite restaurant in New Rochelle. (Kuno especially likes the pashwari naan, and greets the delivery man with a happy, ‘Ahhhhhhh!”)