Warren the Bipolar Canada Goose

by Robert C. Chamberlin

February 23, 2003

I was sitting in the psychiatric services waiting room the other day and suddenly realized when I parted the curtains of my self-absorbed thoughts that a Canada goose was perched on a chair directly across from me. I slowly looked around the room at the other patients who were pretending to read magazines or staring at their shoes but not paying attention to the feathered fowl.

I began to question whether I had taken the proper dosage of the correct pills that morning and wondered if the creature might be an aberration on my part.

At that point I heard a loud, piercing, squawk, “Aaaffflack!”

I immediately thought to myself, Oh no! It’s that damn irritating duck that screeches on a commercial fifty times a day on every channel.

As if reading my mind, the bird stared directly at me and calmly said, “I’m not a duck. I’m a Canada goose. I have a cold and that was a sneeze.”

I looked around the waiting room and to my amazement everyone was staring at me as if it was my turn to say something. So I did, “Bless you.”

The goose said, “Thank you.”

I added, “You’re welcome.”

I raised my hand to glance at my ring watch in a desperate attempt to decipher where I was in time and space and was a bit relieved to see that it was on upside down. Without trying to be obvious, I casually slipped off the ring and righted it with the twelve on top.

I squeezed my eyes tightly, took a deep breath, exhaled and slowly looked up. The goose was still there and continued to look directly at me. My mind flashed back more than forty years to art school and the limited exposure I had experienced with surrealism.

I once again glanced around the room at the others who continued to thumb through the same upside down magazines or stare at shoes that fidgeted with strange rhythms. This indeed was a genuine surrealistic situation and I decided to let go of whatever reality I might know and play it for whatever it was worth.

I asked, “Do you have a name?”

“Of course I have a name. Warren, Warren Terror; not to be confused with the war-on-terror that you people perpetually talk about. Although my job certainly can be terrorizing.”

With only slightly raised eyebrows, I asked, “You have a job?”

“Do I have a job? I’m the lead goose in my flock. Every spring and fall it’s my responsibility to lead my flock back and forth between the north and south pole. My doctor calls it Bi-polar.”

I paused for a moment with that thought, then responded, “That’s interesting. I’m also bipolar, but I don’t travel any farther north than Joey’s Northside Grocery or any farther south than the Southend Liquor Store.”

He looked at me quizzically, as if he didn’t understand what I was talking about, then shifted from one foot to the other in his chair and belted out another, “Aaaffflack!”

“Bless you.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

I continued, “Why do you find your job terrorizing?”

He responded, “Are you kidding? How would you like to be minding your own business migrating up and down the east coast corridor and have strange men with red necks dressed in orange suits trying to blast you out of the sky?”

He went on, “Sometimes they get a couple of us too. Unlike your kind, we mate for life and when we lose a partner after twenty years it can be devastating.”

I told him I could understand what he was saying and added that “our kind” used to mate for life, but it wasn’t very common anymore.

I then asked, “Do you ever get creative spurts when you’re ‘Up?’”

He pondered this for a minute, then replied, “Well, I don’t know how creative it is but I like to play tricks on the rest of the flock sometimes.”

“What kind of tricks?”

He chuckled a bit and said, “Last spring on our trip back north they all were squawking that I was flying too fast and kept screeching for me to slow down. I fixed ‘um. I slowed down all right, but started to bear left in a big wide circle over Pennsylvania. I had ‘um flying around in a circle for six hours and nobody was the wiser.”

He cackled out loud and said, “They are still trying to figure out why it took us so long to get across Pennsylvania. The bird brains finally decided it had something to do with El Nino.

After some further exchanges, we discovered that we were both there to see the same doctor. My appointment was at 3:03 and his at 3:12.

I asked, “Do you have a partner?”

“Of course I have a partner! Whoever heard of a number one goose without a partner? Her name’s Honk, Honk Twice.”

I remarked that Honk Twice was an odd name and it sounded more like a bumper sticker. He went on to explain that Honk’s mother’s name was Honk, so they named her Honk Twice.

“Where is Honk now?”

“She’s out in the parking lot with all the others.”

“How many of you are there?”

“Fifty-nine, including me. There used to be close to one hundred of us in our flock a couple of years ago. We lost a few to the red-necked orange suited hunters DN and then a group of the older ones got tired of traveling and settled down in the Barge Canal.”

Warren was so affable and personable that I felt comfortable asking him why he was there to see a psychiatrist. With a pained expression on his face, he said,

“Well, I think a lot of my problems started with the weather last year. We waited and waited for that first killing frost and by the time it got here we were way behind schedule. All the others were squawking about the date, took a vote, and decided they didn’t want to go south. They said I could go, but they weren’t going to follow me. Even Honk didn’t want to go! What was I to do? I certainly wasn’t going to fly south alone! Whoever heard of the lead goose flying south alone with nobody following him! What an embarrassment that would be!”

“Along with that, I’ve been having difficulty dealing with the mood swings the doctor told me to expect with this Bi-polar condition. He explained that I would experience a series of ups and downs, including extreme highs and lows, over the course of the next weeks and months – and quite probably for the rest of my life.”

“I’m very confused at this point. Here I am up north, but feeling very down because we didn’t get to fly south to the Keys last year. But on the other wing, sometimes when I’m down south I feel very up with the sandy beaches, seeing old friends, the festive atmosphere and all. I just can’t figure out how I can be up north and feeling down, or down south and feeling up.”

He stared at me silently as if expecting an answer from me. All I could think of to say was, “Are you on any medications?”

“Huh! All he prescribes is bottled spring water, southern fried chicken, northern pike, and garlic tablets. That certainly doesn’t help me with all the anxiety I’m feeling. You wouldn’t happen to have an extra Valium, would you? They say it does wonders.”

I said, “No, I take Xanax.”

He shot back, “It’s all the same, uppers for the north, downers for the south, it’s all the same stuff.”

At this point I began to feel the pangs of a panic attack approaching and immediately popped a Xanax from the pill bottle I carried with me.

I looked at him intently, pondering what he had been talking about earlier and said, “Are you trying to say that all manics are in the south and all depressives are in the north?”

He replied sullenly, “Don’t ask me. Whoever heard of down north or up south?”

After pondering that for a moment I said, “Well, around here one goes down North Main Street and up South Main Street.”

His agitation got worse, he sneezed a couple of times, then responded, “Well that’s why I’m here. I’ve lost all sense of direction, don’t know up from down anymore and everyone else is out in the parking lot waiting for me to take the lead! That doctor had better have some answers for me today or I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

Almost as if on cue, the door opened, the psychiatrist smiled at me, raised his eyebrows and quietly invited me in with, “Robert?”

As I got up, Warren shifted from one foot to the other in his chair and looked at me out of the corner of one eye but said nothing. As I walked by him, I coughed and inconspicuously slipped a Xanax tablet under his right wing.

The visit with the doctor was short and uneventful. He renewed the scripts for my medications and saw me to the door. Just as I walked out, I turned to him and said, “Doctor, what would you say if I told you there was a Bi-polar Canada goose out there waiting to see you next?”

He smiled softly and said, “Just continue to take your medications Robert and everything will be fine.”

As I stood at the window to schedule my next appointment, I heard the door open again and the doctor say, “Warren, Warren Terror?”

Another loud screeching, “Aaaffflack!”

I said, “Bless you.”

He whispered, “Thank you.”

I said, “Good luck.” He winked at me and then waddled through the doorway.