[Oe List ...] A story of radical Being!

[KroegerD at aol.com]

This Man Touched My Parrot 
Would you take your brand-new, adorable pet to a quirky veterinarian who lived like a hobbit? 

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist 
  Friday, August 20, 2004
 

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How good and refreshing and inspiring is it, in these war-drunk, anti-everything, BushCo-ravaged times, to discover a gem of pure unadulterated free-thinking humanity and funkiness and animal tenderness sitting just outside the teeming, reeking city walls? 
How life affirming and encouraging is it to stumble, quite randomly, quite unexpectedly, across what is probably the funniest, most caring, most quirky, most unexpected, most hugely popular, intensely local veterinarian in the entire Bay Area even though I can't verify that because I've only been to like, two, but I'm willing to risk saying it anyway? 

I am here with an answer: It is very, very good indeed. 

This is what happened. The S.O., she has this parrot. A brand-new parrot, actually, a beautiful, young African Grey, recently acquired from a breeder quite by accident and quite by unplanned revelation and by oh-my-God-what-the-hell-are-we-doing impulse purchase (I know, I know) at the San Francisco Bird Mart. But that's, as they say, another column. 

So we realized that this bird, this new life addition, this madly wondrous, chirping, curious beast of the Congo, she needed a checkup. The breeder we purchased her from was fine and responsible and caring, but as every book and Web site says, find yourself a good vet ASAP and take the bird in anyway, just to make sure. Check the talons. Take a blood test. Kick the aviary tires. That sort of thing. It's just good practice. 

So we looked up vets in the City. We asked around. And we discovered that aviary vets, particularly in San Francisco, are just ridiculously and prohibitively expensive, and we found that the words "ridiculously expensive" did not jibe at all well with our bank account after the acquisition of this not-at-all inexpensive animal and her cage and her 27 dangling puzzle toys and her seeds and pellets and manzanita perches and by the way did I mention they can live for 60 years? I mean, yikes. 

But then. A local pet-store owner recommended this vet out in Novato, a one Dr. Chuck Galvin. Amazingly affordable, she said. Been going to him myself for 30 years, she said. He's very well loved in the community and has a great birdside manner and it's very worth the drive, she said. And that was it. That's all we knew. 

Little did we know. 

Right off the bat, even just pulling into the driveway, we knew something was different. Dr. Galvin's shop, it is a wonder, a true intimate wonderland of quirk and personality and pure pet bliss. It is like nothing you've ever seen from any sort of medical practitioner anywhere unless you visit the occasional grinning shaman or forest gnome or sly knowing oddball sage. 

The clinic is a lush and overgrown home of a divine hobbit. It is a funky all-wood nook packed with crazy foliage and peculiar collectibles, a deliriously adorable assortment of knickknacks absolutely everywhere, figurines and drawings and skulls, fairies and elves and funny monsters and gargoyles and eccentric, wonderful artwork, much of it by the doc's own hand. 

There were smiling rocks with eyes. There were carved trolls and grinning gnomes. There were quotes and quips hand written onto the walls, and photographs, and elf doors, and good puns, and bad puns, every nook and cranny carefully or not-so-carefully offering up some facet of personality, of heartwarming individuality. 

His tiny staff was wonderful and friendly and there wasn't a whitewashed wall or bland overlit florescent clinical feel anywhere. You knew it immediately: You had entered a magic place, a slightly altered reality, and you didn't want to leave. 

And we sat there, waiting our turn (the doc, we were told, always runs late, and he works crazy 20-hour days and has done so for decades and has such a devoted, long-standing clientele as to make any doc envious), and couldn't wait to meet the man himself, just to see the guy who inspired all this. 

And, finally, we did. And he was warm and quirky and incredible. He had a head of unkempt gray hair and wore a torn T-shirt and a shamanistic eyeball bracelet and a Buddha necklace and looked tired and relaxed and harried and permanently ingrained with tenderness and joy for his work and love for his clients, all at once. 

He checked out my S.O.'s Grey, lovingly, carefully, with humor and tenderness and easy, friendly chatter. And after it was all done you just wanted to buy him a green tea and sit down somewhere and talk to him for hours. I mean, what a thing. 

And, indeed, Galvin charged but a fraction of City prices, just ridiculously, almost unfairly low, so low that you wanted to pay him extra just for the experience, and to make sure he stays in business, and to maybe help pay for some sort of magic elixir to keep him going for another 100 years, at least. 

Because oh my God how easy is it, in the days of bogus Orange Alerts and government sneers and lies about war and lies about gays and lies about the environment and lies about what it means to be a caring American, to become jaded, to think that everyone is trying to ream you, to pull one over, to overcharge and give biased or tainted advice, to be, by default, selfish and self-serving and bitter. This, right now, if you read the news or watch any BushCo press conference, seems to be the American way. 

And I have little idea of Galvin's background, or his client history, or any problems he may have had. I do not know the exact details of his training, or what specialties (besides birds, which make up a quarter of his practice) he specializes in. 

It doesn't really matter. One look around that place, and two minutes with the doc himself, and you get it. You understand why he is so loved by his clients, why some have been going to him for three decades, why he inspires such admiration and laughter and ease. 

He made you wish you had had a pet or three for the past 30 years and had been going to him forever. It made you wish that every vet was like this, that every doctor was like this, that you yourownself could be treated here for whatever might ail you, all the while realizing that just by visiting such a place, just by being in the good doc's quirky funny warm-hearted creative presence in the first place -- hell, just by showing up -- you felt better already. 

Oh, yes, and the bird did, too.
 


-- 
Dick Kroeger