You sat on the upper of the two plastic perches in your little cage, which was about fourteen by eighteen inches, and twenty-two or so inches high. It rested on the shelf across from Mother. She lay in her hospital bed, her soft, white, neck-length hair still held a hint brown at the back although she was eighty-six.

As I leaned over to kiss her, I could still see vestiges of her resemblance to Katharine Hepburn, the high cheekbones; the straight, delicate nose; the well-shaped, brown eyes. Aside from her remarks of unhappiness with your silence, when we spoke, she exhibited a fair amount of liveliness, despite the hospital hell into which she’d plunged.

I pulled up the chair next to her. We talked about her nurses and how they moved her phone or newspaper to where she couldn’t reach it, and about my latest encounter with my horrible, loud, rude neighbors, particularly he who currently lived above me. He came home from work at two in the morning and made loud, banging noises. One night it had gone on for half-an-hour. I went up and knocked. Instead of answering, he banged back so violently from his side that the panel on his door bounced out of the door and the lintel broke.

Mother said, “He could be Rory’s clone!”

“Yes,” I asserted, “he could.”

We also talked about politics. The election was coming.

But through Mother’s and my conversation about ourselves and the world, I found myself standing, glancing over at you. Magnetized. Like an animal in a movie, you were stealing the
scene.

I went over and peered in at you. “So this is the bird,” I said.
“Yes, that’s the bird.” Her disgruntlement re-emerged.


But immediately you inspired my smile. “Hello, little birdie. How ya doin’ today?” Your green feathers were bright and beautiful, if only the ordinary green of parakeets in the wild; in the wild, your kind are all the same color. But in captivity parakeets have been bred to blue feathers, turquoise, yellow, even violet. You were only green. But still there was something about you. My voice took on a lilting gentleness. “Wha’cha thinkin’ about in there, all by your little ole lonesome?”

Did you look back at me? I don’t recall. But, standing there, leaning over your cage, I felt a connection. Or maybe it was just an impulse to connect, to hold you, to stroke your soft, feathered back. A craving to pet you.

I also protective toward you, that you were vulnerable, an impression that was soon confirmed. A nurse came in to take Mother’s blood pressure. On her way out, she stuck her finger in your cage and giggled when you siddled nervously to the center of your upper perch and huddled there by yourself. I told the nurse, “I think you’re scaring him.”

“Oh,” she said, but looked blank. I could see she didn’t get it, or didn’t care.

“Sorry,” I told you after she left the room. “I’m having trouble saving my mother from these nurses, let alone you.” But that did not stop me from feeling bad for you. You were small and young and the hospital racket was constant with multiple conversations and footfalls echoing from the other rooms and the hallway, with all the televisions blaring in the different rooms including Mother’s from her half-deaf roommate, accompanied by the occasional engine grinding loudly out of cleaning machines. Noise saturated the hospital air and Mother’s room like smog pervaded the atmosphere outside. Little did I know how much you loved a busy racket. Months later, my electric toothbrush alone would set you to chirping, and the lawn mower across the street would produce ecstasies.

Mother’s room was also glaringly bright from an excess of fluorescent bulbs, and people were sticking their fingers in your cage. I thought you must be very frightened.

“Poor little birdie! Are you scared of the big bad nurses? Me, too! All three of us!” I turned to my mother. “Isn’t that right?”

“Yes,” she agreed. “That’s exactly right.”

But over the next week Mother still did not bond with you. “He still hasn’t said anything,” she complained to me on the phone, in continued disappointment.

“But doesn’t he bring you any joy at all?”

“No. Not really.”

Her bleakness became my own. I’d had such hope, I had so wanted her to find a bit of joy. But between her excruciating pain and the abuse she’d had to endure from the CNA when she was supposed to be recovering from a six-hour operation, maybe nothing on Earth could have helped distract her.

And then, despite being trapped in that hospital, in her aged body with its recent operation, trapped among people who did not care about her or for her, her old spirit, her old self, the self she’d become a quarter-century before in the face of cancer, began to reassert itself. You were there; she couldn’t just ignore you. That would be wrong. She had not bonded with you. But as she began fighting back toward mental coherence, she found consideration for you.

“What should I call him?” she asked me.


At our next visit, Mother and I took on the question of naming you.

The first thing I thought of was that sad, beautiful song from Man of La Mancha, sung by a young woman who has lost her lover. “Little bird, little bird, in the cinnamon tree. Little bird, little bird, do you sing for me?” She tells him “to fly, to go, to tell” her lover she “loves (him) so;” but her next lyrics reveal that she is really saying good-bye. She knows that, despite her love, the affair is over, and she accepts this reality with grace. The melody is moving; and this young woman in the story had love—which I’d never done—and she had the dignity and strength to let it go. She was so admirable to me. Her companion in love and loss was the little bird singing in the cinnamon tree. I guess I was thinking about a companion, perhaps in loss. Perhaps I was thinking about my mother’s future.

You’d think I’d have said, “Let’s call him Little Bird,” but that seemed so generic. “What about Cinnamon?”

“All right,” Mother said.

So your name—the first name I gave you—was Cinnamon.

And I could not help it: I left Mother’s bed and crossed the room to your cage, where you stood on your perch, once more huddled into yourself. Shy and nervous, you watched me while, softly and in my inherited, way off-key voice, I sang the whole song to you.

I was beginning to really like you, even though you just sat there. At that time you had no toys. You had nothing to do. Or say. But the more I stood beside you and looked at you looking up at me, I found myself entranced. I sensed a compatible personality, a special creature in you. I was not yet aware of that large personality in your little body. But you were so sweet. And you did not belong to anyone else.
For a few years after I’d left home at nineteen, although I thought in general that I’d never bond with another animal, I did sometimes imagine getting a Siamese cat. But the apartments I was able to afford did not permit pets. This included the bachelor in which I ended up for three decades. I’d thought of this apartment as temporary, a short stop on my way to being a successful writer. But over time it became less temporary, and my desire for a Siamese cat slipped away. Only in the last few years before I saw you did my latest landlord (one of many; I still lived at this bachelor and had gone through several) allow their tenants cats and dogs. But it had been thirty years since I’d left home and been without a pet. I didn’t experience myself as lonely; and the cats that other tenants owned—a black cat, a couple of tabbies— were uninteresting to me. They made little “mews” and displayed no personality that I could see. None of them inspired me to think about getting a cat myself. And, nearly sleepless, I was too tired to deal with walking a dog, even if I’d wanted to. But dogs were as boring to me as these cats.

The last nail in my boarded-up heart had been nailed in by increments of passing time.

But here you were, so different from any concept I had of a pet. A new space opened up within me. You were there for my mother. But while my mother showed enough interest to name you, she was still not bonding with you.

You wouldn’t take up much room, I thought, surprising myself. No one would object to a little bird like you.

Well, this was just a little thought, little as you, flying around my brain in bright green, with a yellow crown. And perky eyes.


The nurse helped Mother into a wheelchair and wheeled her onto the patio. Following along, I picked up your cage. I placed it on the small round patio table where I pulled up a chair next to Mother, in the shade of the table umbrella. The July sun was bright and hot on the other side of our shade. The shade was also quite warm, but not the broiling heat Los Angeles summer would eventually become; and none of us minded.

In my other hand I’d carried out Mother’s lunch plate. I went back to her room and got her silverware and the glass of bright red sugar water or whatever it was they gave her despite my written request to the social worker and chef not to do so. Just looking at it made me shudder. But Mother, who at home had loved the huge salads she made—from lettuce, tomato, onion, garlic, jicama, broccoli, cauliflower, cucumber, zucchini, carrots, celery, and more—enjoyed her hideously sugary hospital incarnadine drink.

Seating myself beside her, I used her clean spoon to take a few small bites from her plate of tasty, gravied chicken. It had a somehow processed texture, as if it had been frozen for a millennium then defrosted slowly in subtle chemicals, then cooked with strong spices.

“The food here may not be healthy,” Mother said, also eating, “but it’s good.”

“Yes,” I agreed on both counts.

After finishing our meal, while I flossed, you cocked you head and leaned way over to the side to watch me. You leaned over farther and farther, so far you seemed about to hang upside down, amused by my flossing. You seemed to have a grin on your face. Of course, you don’t have the muscles to grin. But I saw it as a grin and I grinned back. You were so cute. I leaned toward you. “Hello, little Cinnamon,” I said, in the voice I’d use to address a very young child.

Your eyes interested but nervous—but less nervous than before—you looked back. Holding your feathers close to your body, still shyly contained, you gave a chirp!

In the otherwise silent patio, that small sound stood out so beautifully that, for the first time, I heard the true music of birdsong. Suddenly I could really see why she loved to listen to the birds. Perhaps there was a silence in my heart, where I also heard you. Where that intrepid chirp took root forever.

“Is that the first time he’s chirped?” I asked Mother.

“Yes!” she said, in wonder.

Hearing this, I felt proud, or flattered. Although I knew nothing about birds, I sensed that your breed is different from cats and dogs. You’ve never truly been domesticated. You were still a wild little animal. You’d fly away if I opened the cage. To earn this hint of trust from you moved me. “He’s never chirped before?”

“No, never,” she confirmed, impressed.

I started to fall in love. Your chirping for me validated my earlier feeling that there was some connection between us. We were bonding.

Or, I was.

The words came out of my mouth. “Would you mind if I took him home?”

“No,” she answered, before I could take it back.

But I’d spoken precipitously. Having a pet would be such a leap. I just asked the question to make sure my mother wouldn’t mind before I let myself think about it seriously. The only living things in my apartment for the last three decades besides myself were, once, roaches, and after they were gone, a refrigerator guy pulled some kind of plank from the wall behind the refrigerator and, for a week, until the guy came back and fixed the hole, a mouse kept running out from behind the refrigerator.

“No,” she said. “You can have him.”

“Well, I’m not sure. I’ll have to think about it.” I studied you. You sat looking back at me, apparently with continued interest.

I thought about the wild green parrots of Los Angeles. My apartment was situated under the flight path of one of their flocks. Often I found myself sitting outside on the porch, escaping the loud stereos or televisions inside, when suddenly a raucous chirping and screaming drew my attention skyward. No matter how loud, I never experienced animal noises as nerve-racking, the way I did electronic sounds. And the joyous, territorial, aggressive, noisy freedom of these parrot flocks vicariously satisfied all my own feelings and needs – to express anger, to aggressively claim my own space, to love life, to fly...

I thought how wonderful it would be to hear a small chirping inside my own apartment, from my own bird. What I’d imagined for my mother was translating into a desire for myself.

I put it away and concentrated on talking with my mother, cheering her up with stories in the news, which brought her back to the self she knew; the self who’d read the paper cover to cover since she was an adult. I told her about the battle for the Presidency between Bush and Gore. She listened with fascination. “You don’t say!”

But throughout our conversation, the idea of bringing you home must have been nibbling away at the back of mind—the kind of gentle nibble you would one day give the little knob on the left side of the tip of my nose—because as I was leaving the hospital at the end of my visit, I passed the door that said “Social Worker” and when I saw it was open and Linda was working at her desk, I gave a little knock and went into the office. The thought of owning you had popped back up again as if it had just been waiting.

Tentatively, I asked, “Linda, my mother isn’t bonding with her bird. But I am. Do you think I could buy him?” Once more I felt my question was theoretical, not committed.