I don’t quite know what that would look like. I’ve seen pigeons. I’ve seen toads. Never combined.

I heard a guy once say, “I’m pigeon toad.” I looked at him closely. I didn’t see it.

I wonder what they would taste like. I’m not sure I would like it.

I have idly wondered about pigeons. How should you cook them. I have eaten other birds. Chickens. Turkeys. Rock Cornish game hens. I may have eaten squab, but I’m not sure. I doubt it.

I think if you were to catch a big fat pigeon and shuck its feathers off, and put it on a spit and hold it over hot coals, you could barbeque it and decide what kind of sauce goes with pigeon. And you should probably have it government certified to be disease free. That would be important.

The reason I mention it is because I once saw a man cooking a pigeon. It was in front of the Los Angeles Public Library. There were bushes, and a fountain where you could wash your hands and feet and the pigeon you were going to eat.

There were homeless people living in the bushes and washing in the fountain and drinking the water. I was much younger at the time.

The city thought it was becoming a problem and got rid of the homeless people by thinning out the bushes and turning off the fountain. I may have been one of the last people to see a homeless person cook a pigeon.

The man looked very dirty and hungry with not enough clothes, and he had a pigeon that he probably caught by luring it. He had it down on the ground with most of its feathers pulled off and scattered around. He had a little fire going on the concrete and was putting little sticks and branches on it that looked dry that he had collected from the bushes. He was just about ready to stick a stick through the pigeon and hold it over the fire to cook. I was fascinated, so I must have been a little boy at the time. I don’t know how I got there to the library, probably with my parents or at least my mother, who probably went into the library ahead of me to get at the books, but I stayed behind to watch the homeless man cook his pigeon.

Then I thought he might be dangerous. He might think I wanted some of his pigeon. I was always hungry all the way from when I was a little boy, and I didn’t expect him to share. But I imagined he could have thought I would fight him over the pigeon, and I didn’t stay around to find out. So I never saw him finish cooking it, and I never got to eat pigeon to this very day.

Life is full of missed opportunities.

And thinking about pigeons and toads, toads are like frogs, and there was this place near Riverside that they said served frogs legs, and people went there because you couldn’t get them anywhere else. And we never went, and I never did. Except for this one time at an outdoor kind of festival where someone was selling barbeque frogs legs like Louisiana and I got some because this could be my only chance and I just had to try them to find out, but they were way too greasy and unpleasant and I thought twice about them.

And toads. They’re like frogs, only bigger and probably meaner. I don’t want to eat them. I hear they’re poison.