(Continued from: My Little Bird - Excerpt #2)
My Little Bird,
Yesterday I called our old landlord and
asked permission to go back and unbury you. I explained I was afraid I
hadn’t buried your box deeply enough. That I’d buried you in the wrong
place. “I have to get his box.”
He said, trying to process my unusual ex-tenant request, “What?”
I explained it all again.
He said, “Okay. No problem. The workmen are there. Just go on in.”
Aside from having bought the building
with full knowledge that among the people he would force out into an exorbitant rental market which we could
not afford, were
seniors and disabled, he was a nice
guy.
Arriving, I entered the open door and walked into the living room with its debris and missing wall. Passing through to the kitchen, I noticed the workmen had torn out the small cupboard below the sink, and I remembered for the first time the bags of beans and various nuts I’d stashed there. I forgot to take them with me. Now the whole cupboard and most of the sink were gone.
I continued outside with my trowel.
***
I buried you the night before I moved. I dug the hole, placed your box inside and covered the dirt back over you. Bill, one of my neighbors, grew up in that apartment and had buried a pet hampster and wild bird he’d caught and tamed. He’d buried his animals outside his own apartment, in the little strip of dirt running next to the building. That was years ago. He could leave that place without regret. But I didn’t want to leave your side. I love you, I said, running my hand over the dirt above your box.
The next day, waiting for the movers, I sat where I’d buried you, a kind of vigil, and wept.
Now I was returning for you; and indeed I’d barely dug half-a-foot and there it was. I was right to come back! After all that struggle of my trowel against the plant roots, the dirt was so loose it barely covered you. I pulled your beautiful varnished box out of the ground. Certainly someone would have unburied it by accident and thrown it away, perhaps after looking inside.
Wiping off the dirt, holding your casket in my hand, I felt immeasurable relief. I had you again! “My sweet little bird,” I said.
I brought you back to my new home and put you in the upper left hand drawer of my desk, the desk upon which you used to play. I feel a deep comfort, having you so near.
Not everyone shares my feeling. Last night my friend Eve, her Texas accent blunted by decades of living in L.A., said, “You have to bury him, you know.”
“Yes, I know.”
But I’m at something of a loss, even aside from sentimentality.
*
***
*
I told Eve, “My old neighbor, Jack, he said he’d help me but then he wouldn’t.”
Jack had lived in my former apartment for fifty years. It was his son, Bill, who had grown up there and buried a tamed wild bird and pet hamster. There was no room there for a dog. Jack had told me, “I buried my son’s dog in the Hills,” he told me one day. The Hollywood Hills.
“When my bird dies, will you drive me up there?” I asked. It was at the beginning of your illness.
He said he would. But when the time came, he said, “It’s illegal to bury an animal up there.”
I reminded him of his promise to help. He shrugged, avoiding my eyes, his own shaded by his cowboy hat.
“It’s just a bird,” I said. “Who’s going to arrest us?”
But he just shrugged again.
I asked my friend, Michael. I thought he’d told me he had helped his girlfriend bury her cat in the park, but I had misremembered. “No,” he said, “we took her cat’s ashes and scattered them on the ground.”
“Well... But could you take me there to bury my bird?”
“It’s illegal. If we got caught with a box and a shovel, the police might think we were terrorists.”
What a picture.
Eve asked, “What about cremation?”
“Do you know how much that costs?”
“No,” she said, and asked obediently, “how much?”
“Eighty dollars!” Still flabbergasted by the information, I added the obvious for emphasis, “For a parakeet!”
“Oh. Well, you’ll still have to find some way to do it.”
“I know.” I sighed. But I was sitting at my desk, and you were close to me, in your box, and my tears were dripping away. “I will.” I know she’s right. But at the moment you are still close to me when I’m at my desk, and I have to say that your box – when I don’t think about decomposing corpses – gives me comfort to have you so close.
***
Meanwhile, when I can, I will come out here and sit here as I do today and type on my little laptop, get down my memories, for fear I will otherwise lose them; I want to remember all your things. I don’t want to forget anything; and I’m afraid I will. But I also want to get everything down on paper—or computer disk—because even worse than forgetting, in my heart of hearts, there is another, worse fear.
I’m afraid I dreamed you. Because if you were real, where are you now?
***
My life feels exactly like it did for the thirty years before you came into it, as dry and ordinary, unlit by love; as if nothing has ever been different. My life without you now is as dry as all those decades when I had no little bird to make me smile every day. I have the scary feeling I just imagined you.
This fear goes back to my childhood—the not-so-great part of my relationship with my mother. “Oh, you’re crazy!” she’d say if I brought up something that did not coincide with her beliefs or with her memory of a particular event. “Oh, you imagined that.”
I was crazy and I imagined things, and if I insisted that I did think, feel, want, need, desire, remember what I did, she resorted to those words she so often flung at me: “Oh my god, there’s something radically wrong with you!” I have said that I never knew which might inspire those blasts of horror and terror from her, as she stared holes through me, but I guess that is not true. One cause was my insistence on my own reality, even though my insistence was not, initially, stubborn; it was naive. “But, no, Mother, I really do want...”
“Oh my god, there’s... !”
By the time I was a teen and did deliberately insist on my own experience, it was too late. No matter how I verbally fought for who I was, I had learned not to trust myself. Indeed, I have never quite unlearned to automatically and profoundly reject my instincts, intuition, feelings because they must be wrong; and if they aren’t wrong, if they are real, then I am wrong to the core of my being; and whatever I most want, need, think—or love—or remember—belongs to that shameful core.
I must remember you. But I dare not remember.
Despite my years of therapy and the love my mother and I came to share, in periods of intense emotion, my early conditioning reasserts itself. It seems to me as I get older that these reassertions are more powerful than ever.
Or perhaps it’s not my age. Perhaps it is only this one event, with you, because I loved you so much and I miss you so deeply. Whenever I enter a room, my heart lifts, expecting to find you, and then I remember. And only then do I know I have not imagined you.
*
***
*
The first story Christine told me was about her friend’s cockatiel. “Whenever he has to go in the car to the vet, it makes him nervous. He paces back and forth on his perch saying, ‘It’s okay, Arnie. It’s okay, Arnie.’ He’s so cute!”
But most impressive, she related tales about another friend’s African gray parrot, Arthur. Once when Arthur’s owners went on vacation, they left a nanny in charge of their teenage children. When the parents returned, Arthur told them what had happened in the only way he could. He first mimicked the voice of the nanny asking the children, “Where are you going?” And then, in the insolent voice of one of the children, Arthur said, “Nowhere!”
But Arthur also possessed his own streak of mischief. He would mimic the voice of his mistress and call the cat. “Kitty, Kitty, Kitty!” The cat always fell for it, racing over to the voice. Christine said, “The bird always dumped on him.”
“One time,” Christine told me, “Arthur’s owners were having workmen fixing their kitchen. They swore a lot and Arthur picked up their language. Jen and Bill” – the bird’s owners – didn’t know what to do to get him to stop. Finally they decided to just ignore Arthur every time he said a bad word. After a while he stopped cursing, and Jen and Bill congratulated themselves. About three months later, Jen was getting dressed for a party. She brought Arthur’s cage with her into the bedroom while she put on her make-up.”
“Why,” I interrupted, knowing nothing about birds at this point, “did she bring his cage?”
“Birds want your company,” Christine responded, a bit tart at my stupidity. “They don’t follow you like dogs. You take their cage with you. Anyway!” she went on. “Jen was putting on her make-up when Arthur said, in a very sweet voice, ‘Jen.’ Jen said, as sweetly, ‘Yes, Arthur?’ And Arthur said, `SHIT!’”
In fact, this mischievous trait is common to the parrot species. Recently I encountered a man who owns eight birds, a couple of cockatiels and some parrots and macaws. Whenever the man gets near his Amazon, it bites him. The man says, “Bad bird!” Then he does what people used to do to train birds, employing a technique no longer encouraged: he slaps the bird lightly across its beak with a couple of fingers.
“What does he do when you do that?” I asked, worried for the bird.
“He laughs at me.” He imitated his bird, giving a loud wild cackle. “He laughs every time.”
I laughed. “It’s probably why he bites you in the first place.”
Recently, during an interview, writer P. J. O’Roarke described another example of the avian concept of self-entertainment. O’Roarke said that when he was in Green Zone in Bagdad, someone had a pet parrot they brought out to the pool. Parrots can mimic electrical sounds perfectly – fax machines, computers, ringing phones. O’Roarke related – I paraphrase, but only slightly – “When everything was quiet for a few days and people were swimming or lounging around the pool having cocktails, suddenly the parrot would mimic the sound of an incoming missile, then watch everyone dive for cover. “The parrot laughed, immensely enjoying all this excitement.”
*
***
*
My Little Bird,
I talked to Eve last night for the first time in two weeks. When she learned your box is still in my desk, she exclaimed, “Alexa!” She laughed. “You have to bury that bird!” Irony laced her emphatic tone of logic and sanity. Eve owns a Siamese cat that she loves. She has spent a fortune on that cat because of his cancer. But this fact does not detract from her ability to reason.
“I know.” I confessed, “I’m starting to feel a little like a neighbor I had in my other apartment.” The noisy bachelor apartment, where I lived when I got you. “I had a friend who lived next door.” I told Eve about Annette, and how I’d thought I was so different.
***
Annette was a heavy blonde in her early sixties. She’d been the manager of an apartment, but there was some problem with the owners and now she was being kicked out. Alienated from all her relatives as well, Annette loved to excess her little white dog, who looked like a stuffed toy with that white fur falling in his eyes. He was her only family and solace.
At dusk in the summer, when I went onto my porch to escape my fellow loud tenants, setting you in your cage next to me, Annette was often out walking her dog. Then her life collapsed. She had just found a new job when her dog got very sick. That evening she came to my apartment. She was crying and carrying the little white fluffy fellow wrapped in her jacket. She held him tenderly against her chest. The dog was so weak he couldn’t stand. He gave a feeble cough, then coughed again. “It’s hard for him to breathe,” she told me.
Annette’s phone had been disconnected. She asked to use mine, to find a vet. It was after hours, around seven, but Annette called several offices listed in the Yellow Pages and found someone who was still open. She took her dog there on the bus. The vet could have given the dog a shot that might have saved his life, but he didn’t because Annette couldn’t pay him right then. “But I have a job!” She begged him. “You can call them tomorrow!” But he wouldn’t help her. She brought her dog home. The next day she found another vet. She was able to pay for that visit. I don’t know if she got the money from work, or where. Anyway, he gave her dog the shot but it was too late. She told me, “He lay on the table, lifted his head, looked around like he was taking in life for the last time. Then he lay his head back down and died.”
Annette told me she sat in the vet’s office and wept for two hours. “The receptionist said she’d never seen anyone cry like that in the office over their pet.” But I guess that was the only money she could get because she couldn’t pay the vet to cremate her dog. So she took him home, whereupon she put him in her freezer. I suggested she remove any food she had in there. She said she did but she was broke. If she had food that needed to be kept frozen, that is likely how she kept it.
It took her a couple of weeks to get enough money to cremate her dog. Then she wrapped the frozen body in a clean blanket and took it on the bus to the vet.
I’d pictured her with this frozen dog corpse, his feet sticking out, wrapped in his blanket, riding the bus. I could have sat right next to someone like that when I rode and have no idea. I thought that Annette’s life had gone from sad to weird, or tragedy to farce. I could see all kinds of movie scenarios for the image she presented in my mind, in which a surrealistic black humor prevailed. Maybe someone else, maybe another woman, would be carrying something unknown, perhaps also dead, wrapped in another blanket – and the two women would look at each other in an equally dazed state – each wondering what had happened to their lives – and continue on to separate seats. Down and out in Hollywood. Riding the L.A. bus. Life and death in City of the Angels.
I never thought that I would play out a similar scene, the ceaseless weeping, my mother and father dead, my other family members few, ill and too far away to visit or speak with much; and how much was my concern about money and the huge cost of avian vets responsible for your death? Did I stall too long before going? Should I have paid for an X-ray? Or would it have made any difference with that vet?
And now I had your cadaver in my desk.
I told Eve Annette’s story. “I guess I have my own farce.”
My baby, what will I do with your little body? Is it all bones and feathers by now?
***
At night, before I pulled the cover over your cage, I sometimes watched you in the semi-dark as you moved about on your perch. Your body was shadowy but your yellow crown seemed to glow. Bobbing around at the back of your cage on the top perch in only the dimmest light from another room, you looked with that glowing crown like a ghost. Recently I saw a PBS documentary about birds and learned there is actually something in those yellow feathers that does glow, so that your feral kind can recognize and find each other. I wish I’d known.
I do not dream about you every night, as I did during your last year. Each morning I asked you, “Did you dream about me, too?”
You always looked at me when I spoke, but you did not answer.
It was the same when you sang without intermittant shrieks. I wanted to express my appreciation and to give you positive reinforcement. “That’s so beautiful, sweetie,” I would say.
And you would stop singing to look at me and listen courteously, waiting for more.
“Keep singing,” I encouraged. “I didn’t mean for you to stop!”
But you waited patiently, watching me, listening.
***
In one of my dreams we were at a crowded park. Sunlight flooded down. On my shoulder, you flew off over the busy, laughing people on the grass, into the brilliance of the day. But when I called, you flew back to me, the sun on your wings, to land on my shoulder; and my joy was indescribable, that you trusted me so much, that we were so connected.
But my first major dream about you was precognitive. I thought at the time it might but, though I dared hope, I realized it might also be only a wish. I could not envision how the change might occur. I dreamed that every time I reached out my hand to you, you stepped onto it. At that time you had never once done so.
My acupuncturist says that you are today flying happily around, in the ethers, I presume. Or Heaven? She is Korean, Christian and always smiles. She is as attractive as a movie star.
“How do you know?” I ask.
“I just do,” she says. Smiling. Wafting out of the room, leaving me lying like a pin cushion.
I wish I did. I wish I knew.
My ghost.
***
Each morning I wake with tears in my eyes. I often can’t open my mouth to talk about you without sobbing. But Eve, at least, is right. I’m becoming aware that keeping you where you are – your material self – might not be so sanitary. I have begun to imagine billions of bacteria swarming out of your box, which is sealed but not hermetically so, into my desk drawer.
There must be someone who will take me, with your box, into the hills, to bury you where it is beautiful and wild. Where is the hero with a car who will risk Guantanamo to help us?
***
It occurs to me, however, that should I find such a hero, I ought keep my pen still and typing fingers off my computer keys. No point confessing to a felonious funeral.
*
***
*
When I mentioned to Christine that I’d purchased you from the nursing hospital where my mother stayed, she said, “I knew it had something to do with your mother!” As if just loving you for yourself was not explanation enough for grieving over you; as if somehow a small-bird personality was not big enough to justify the size of my grief.
Of course, she’s not the only one with such a prejudice. Whenever I used to encounter someone who owned a parrot, perhaps in the pet shop or walking down the street with a beautiful cockatoo or macaw on their shoulder, and I stopped to chat, the person would ask, “What kind of bird do you have?”
“A parakeet.”
And the person’s face would inevitably take on a superior, patronizing expression. “Oh.” For him or her, the conversation was over.
I have to admit I bore a hint of such feelings, evident in my occasional surprise at your habits.
***
Each morning, I look at the top of the dresser where I used to keep your cage. Each morning, when I decided there was no way I’d be able to go back to sleep, I would turn on the radio. Then I waited for you to chirp, to let me know you were awake. Then I’d get up again, uncover you and open your door, sticking on the clothespin to keep it open.
You greeted all the mirrors in your cage, then came out and greeted the rectangular one lying on the dresser, then the one that looks like a pagoda, also lying on the dresser top. It used to hang in your cage, but you would put one foot on it to hold it in place and bite relentlessly at the corners. One day I discovered a small piece of a plastic corner missing. I couldn’t find it in or outside of your cage. I prayed you hadn’t swallowed it, because it would be sharp and could kill you.
I took the toy down and lay it atop the dresser, outside your cage, where you couldn’t get that kind of grip on it. Instead, you knocked and nudged it around, and finally banged it off the dresser. Then you looked down at it pointedly, then at me. Awk! you demanded until, groaning with fatigue, I got up, took it to the bathroom, rinsed it off and brought it back to you. Then you knocked it off again.
We did this a few times, until I told you, firmly, “That’s it. If you knock it off again, you’ll have to get it yourself.” You knocked it off again, squawked quite a bit at my intransigence, and finally gave up trying to direct me. You climbed your orange plastic ladder and greeted the mirror at its top. Then you went back inside your cage and ate breakfast.
Once we were both up, still in my bedroom, I sat with my feet on the wooden platform sticking out a little under my mattress. I’d gotten you out of your cage. Now I put you on my knees, where you commenced to pick assiduously at the threads of my jeans. This was often when I wondered aloud, “How can such a little bird have such a great big personality?” You looked up at me then continued shredding my jeans.
The moment was idyllic. The bedroom curtains were open, the green plants waving outside, ferns, a yellow trumpet flower, the sun flowing in thinly through the foliage. Sometimes I brought one of your mirrors to hold between my knees so you could have both me and your mirror friend while we visited. You pecked at the mirror and chirped before you flew back to your cage. I smiled.
During the last three or four months, you did something new. After munching on your breakfast seeds and pellets, you climbed to the top of your cage and sort of squatted before the little upside down bell. I’d run a paper clip through the hole in the bottom of the bell and attached the other side to the chain of your favorite perch with attached mirror inside your cage, to hold it up; the original clip had broken off the perch. And now you had discovered this bell, with its distorted image of you, and you hunched in front of it atop your cage and chirped at it quietly and contentedly. You chirped and chirped. And I smiled, my heart lifted and overflowing with the sound of your happiness. I smiled and smiled.
But Christine, who is no fool, is right in one sense.
***
Every deep grief is always related to every other deep grief you’ve known. At the time I stood over my mother’s body in the nursing care hospital, and she looked so alive even though I knew she was not – her hands folded over her chest, the gold wedding ring on one hand; her eyes only half-closed and her mouth half-open, as if she’d just paused between breaths—I did not think about any other death. But deep down, she reminded me of my father, decades before.
I did not see his body. He died in a hospital in Phoenix; two weeks before that, I’d visited him then returned home to Los Angeles. But when I was with him, as we spoke, he had closed his eyes, to rest, and then he turned aside, as Mother sometimes did decades later, and I watched his spirit drifting away, away, away, toward wherever his turned head faced...
I bought you. My mother died six months later. You kept me company through my tears as I wept and grieved over her and wrote about her terrible experience in the nursing care system, in notebooks that became a memoir.
But the truth is, I am wondering if there’s more than the expected chain of past griefs in my feelings for you today. That’s another reason I’m writing these letters. That I must continue. I can feel a deeper truth in the terrible quaking of my heart whenever I think of you, this shuddering need to cry out to Kwan Yin, the Chinese Goddess of Mercy, Compassion and Wisdom—to cry out now, as I did when I thought there was a chance you might survive and stay with me more years, and then as that chance grew ever slimmer—“Kwan Yin, please save my bird!” I still cry out these words in my head even though you are dead and the words are meaningless.
The nursing care system and its workers killed my mother, with the complicity of my weakness and ignorance. The veterinary version of that system was to some degree responsible for what happened to you. But perhaps there is more.
I sense that in this inconsolable cry of loss inside me, to Kwan Yin; in this river of tears that runs through my heart like blood, there is a cross-current, another river of tears: there is something about my mother, something—astoundingly—still unresolved about our relationship, that I’ve carried into my guilt and grief about losing you.
###
Please feel free to contact me with questions or comments.
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