There is a partridge on my coffee table.

My husband brought it home yesterday while I was picking up AJ from preschool and perched it on the edge of my prized copy of a book on Picasso and Portraiture, an expensive souvenir from an absolutely transforming exhibit at MOMA about ten years ago. I repeat, THERE IS A BIRD STANDING ON MY FAVORITE BOOK.

For the record, it is not a real bird but a Styrofoam body covered with feathers, with beady glass eyes and wire feet carefully wrapped in fabric tape. My husband, for some reason, has had the idea for some time that we should have some kind of large bird on the table which heretofore has been solely used as the repository of art books and back copies of Harper�s and the New York Review of Books and the occasional pair of feet. Human feet, that is. Not bird feet.

The bird is kind of cute and creepy at the same time. He looks like a refugee from a Dutch still life, except then he would have been hanging upside-down by his little ankles next to a fat string of sausages. But even though he may look a little healthier on my coffee table, he looks out of place among the magazines and the two Venetian glass paperweights my two great aunts, the ones who were probably lesbians, although noone will admit it, willed to me from their mammoth collection. �We should give him a name,� I suggested. My husband snorted, not even looking up from the paper. �You hate it.� �I don�t hate it. But I think he�s looking at me.�

Maybe he just needs some other objects to complement his fine brown feathers. We try my father�s childhood reading glasses in a brown leather case. We add a bowl of antique marbles that AJ likes to play with. �It looks like he laid a bunch of Easter eggs,� I complain. We take the marbles and glasses away.

AJ has no such aesthetic qualms about the bird. He shoves him aside in order to spread out a large book on the table. The bird peers over his shoulder as he reads. Did I just see it just blink?

This is why I am not an interior designer.

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Holiday link of the day:

When hair bands take on Santa, then �your stocking is stuffed with anarchy.� If you liked Spinal Tap, you must click it now!

[Yesterday's entry was late -- click back if you missed my review of Cookie and Violet]

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