When I posted the story about my Mother’s duck, it brought back memories of my luck with our family’s pet duck.

I was still living at home, probably still in high school when we adopted the duck. As told in Mom’s story, we kept the duck in our two-car garage because they tend to be messy.

I believe it was late afternoon or early evening when I was asked to put one of our cars in the garage but not to let the duck get out. Got it!

If I didn’t have my driver’s license, I was close to getting it but that is insignificant because I had been driving since I was twelve. I knew about clutches, brakes, and the gas pedal. My strategy was to get as close to the garage door as possible, put the car in park, get out and open the garage door. I would then drive in before the duck could get out and close the garage door behind me. Mission accomplished.

I pulled up to the door and, instead of stepping on the brake, I hit the accelerator (that thing called a gas pedal). I crashed the car into the door and, of course, our pet duck–startled–got out. Failure followed by chaos.

That’s the story. The resolution was that the garage door was repairable, the duck was kept somewhere else (it was our pet, after all), and I never was asked to do that again. It may have been the reason we let someone else adopt our pet duck. Not sure on that.