My Little Bird,
I called Linda the day after we spoke about your care, and set it up for the hospital driver to pick me up later in the week so I could buy you and bring you home. Then, having committed myself, I went to a local bird store.
I purchased a bag of seeds and a little book about parakeets. I began reading the book immediately upon arriving home.
The book said I should take a candle around my apartment to hunt for hidden drafts. Drafts killed more pet parakeets than you could count, it said. However, there were only two places in my tiny, jam-packed bachelor where I could keep your cage. The one on top of the two-drawer mini-cabinet that sat atop my tiny desk had the least possibility of drafts. That would have to do.
I pictured your cage there and excitement bubbled inside me. Mother said you were starting to chirp a little. That night, when I did my floor exercises on the threadbare carpet, I envisioned placing your cage next to me. We’d keep each other company.
I imagined how I might feel having you live in my apartment with me, my first animal companion in over three decades. I wanted to make this wonderful for you, too. I continued reading the little parakeet book.
It said that parakeets are very intelligent animals. They got bored easily and should have lots of toys. I went back to the bird store for advice and told the owner, “I’m getting a parakeet. What kind of toys do they like?”
“A mirror will keep him company,” said the Middle Eastern man in his forties. “If you have a single bird, he can’t have too many mirrors.” One of those sentences you can read either way – he should not have too many mirrors or no amount of mirrors would be too many. I understood him to mean the second version, sorted through the collection of toys in the store and bought two with mirrors.
“Any other advice?” I said.
“Keep him out of the sun. These little birds, if they get in the sun, they get dehydrated very easily and can die.”
So you’ll burn up in the sun, like a vampire. Hmm.
At home I cut a piece of material from a spare roll I’d gotten at a yard sale to place over your cage for your travel.
The day before I was to bring you home, I picked up a head of Romaine lettuce because the book said that parakeets need lots of vegetables, not just seeds. It also said to cut up the veggies and fruits into tiny pieces and offer them in a dish. Every day. But I thought, aside from the tedium of all that cutting, they’d oxidize immediately and rot pretty fast.
The book also warned that it might take years for a parakeet to come to like to eat veggies. I hoped that would not be you. I’m not very patient.
The day was approaching. I had the cage cover, Romaine lettuce, seeds, two toys, a place for you, and the book. Did I have everything?
The social worker had told me you were a very young bird. And you were so small. I felt like a pregnant mother preparing the nursery room for the child that was coming.
I was going to have a bird!
***
On the big day, a young Hispanic barely out of his teens picked me up at my apartment. As we drove to Meadows, Mother’s nursing care hospital, we talked about his job. He got paid six-something an hour. “I’m so lucky,” he told me. “That’s what they pay the CNAs. I almost did that job. But I like driving. I just got this job by luck.” He didn’t want to be emptying bedpans for a salary that didn’t even cover his living expenses.
This gave me an insight into the neglect and abuse Mother was subjected to. The CNAs were underpaid; as I would later learn, the nurses were understaffed. This insight did not lead me to forgiveness. But people respond to their conditions. I have a feeling this is something I should keep in mind for myself, for when I really look at this guilt I feel about you, and my anger at others, at how you died.
But when I got to Mother’s room, I forgot all about my driver.
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There you were! I stopped at your cage. You were so sweet. “Hello, Cinnamon,” I said. You shifted on your plastic perch in your cage, into which I could not wait to install toys and fresh veggies. You did not seem to recognize me from my previous, but why would you? And how would I have known if you did, anyway?
I went over to kiss Mother hello and pull up a chair next to her. Mother and I talked about how she was doing, and I told her the latest awfulness about my loud apartment house and the hostile manager. “One of the other tenants that he was going around telling everyone to ignore me if I asked them to please turn down their TVs or stereo.” The blasts now emanated from many apartments.
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Mother said.
But today I could put that all aside. I told her, “This is the day I take Cinnamon home!” And just as I said this, there was a loud, banging noise.
I turned in your direction, wondering what could have caused it. As if in answer to my unspoken question, you introduced me to that schizoid part of you I would one day, but not yet, come especially to love. You gripped your seed dish in your beak and furiously banged it up and down. Then you paused to stare at me.
I frowned, peering back. “What was that?” All my anxieties about taking you home stirred queasily in my stomach. The notion of not bringing you home after all nudged at me vaguely.
As if to kick that nudge into high gear, you continued to stare at me defiantly, and your visage was almost more disturbing than your behavior. Your feathers appeared slightly disheveled. A couple of them poked up on either side on the top of your head like horns. Unrepentant, you beat your dish up and down some more.
I eyed Mother. Maybe this was just an unusual moment. “Does he do that very often?”
“Yes, he does it a lot,” she said, unperturbed but puzzled.
I watched you, my unease growing as you continued to batter your dish and to challenge me with your eyes set in that diabolical countenance. “What do you think of that?” your expression seemed to say.
I think it’s making me really nervous. What had happened to the “just give him seeds and water and change the paper three times a week”? Are you a split personality? A multiple personality? Do you have an unresolved chickhood anger? What happened to the shy little chirps?
What had I gotten myself into?
I turned to Mother. “Did Robbie bring your mail?”
Robbie was Mother’s neighbor. She worked close enough to the hospital to come by and visit. She also picked up Mother’s mail from her house and brought it to the hospital for me to go through.
“She brought it last night.”
I went to the locker-style closet opposite Mother’s bed and pulled out the pile. Setting it next to her, I went through it with her, tossing the ads, pulling out the bills and so on, while the occasional sounds of your banging dish kept my uncertainty fresh. Maybe I shouldn’t bring you home, I thought.
Why couldn’t you have been crazy on an earlier visit so I’d have had some warning and could have considered my options?
But the truth was, I was a chicken with my own chickhood challenges. I felt I had no choice. I felt trapped in the commitment I’d made, the arrangements with Linda. That I had to keep my word about buying you.
By the end of the visit, you were sitting quietly once more upon your upper perch, without apparent expression. Mephistopheles had vanished. You were the very picture of a nice little bird.
Taking a deep breath, nervous but becoming excited again, I picked up your cage, stopping at Linda’s office to pay her.
***
She told me as I wrote the check, “His feathers are trimmed. You can hold him.”
I looked at you nervously, aware once more than you were an untrained wild bird but potentially insane.
Linda fearlessly put her hand inside the cage, brought you out and handed you to me. Not wanting to reveal my cowardice, I put my hand around you carefully. You immediately bit down on my tender flesh with your sharp, shell-crunching beak power. My hand flew open and as you escaped, the words cannon-balled involuntarily from my mouth. “You little f***er!”
Linda laughed.
You’d fluttered over to the bookshelf under the window. Now you tried to squeeze yourself into the little nook formed by two shorter books sandwiched between two larger ones that stuck out on either side. You pressed yourself against the smaller books, looking at us in apprehension.
“The perfect place for a bird who belongs to a writer,” I had to admit, both to Linda and you.
I decided to take this as a good sign.
I let Linda get you out of the bookcase and, amidst much flapping and squawking, put you back in your cage.
That bite would intimidate me for quite a while.
But I soon discovered a more tender part of your personality, the one that reeled me in.
The parakeet book also advised keeping your anxiety to an absolute minimum. “Little birds can have little heart attacks,” it warned.
So from the moment I climbed into the driver’s car, making sure to keep in place the cage cover I’d brought to keep you out of the sun, I started talking to you gently, to ease your anxiety. “You’re going to my apartment with me now. You’re going to have a nice time. Don’t be afraid. Don’t have a little heart attack. I’ll take care of you. This is just a short trip in a car. Have you ever been in a car?”
And in your cage, as we drove and I pattered on, you flew onto the cage bars next to my chest. You clung to the front of your cage, as close to me as you could get, looking right into my eyes, as if asking me to protect you from this scary ride. Or trusting me to do so. You gripped the cage bars and looked at me and I looked back and kept talking gently, smiling at your trust. I even sang a few bars from “our song.” “Little bird, little bird, in the cinnamon tree...”
We’d be all right, I thought.
You were just eccentric.
And I would prove competent.
Linda had given me simple feeding and cleaning instructions. That was all I’d have to do. She knew how to care for parakeets, I thought; aside from the vegetables, which she hadn’t mentioned. She had her own bird, after all, and although hers was a cockatiel, she did bring all these parakeets into the hospital for the patients.
Parakeets about which she’d done no research whatever, I now realize. It wasn’t just the veggies. Those poor hospital parakeets! But I had no idea then of her, and my, ignorance. So I brought you home.
I had always pictured my mother on her deck listening to the birds. I never once imagined myself listening to them myself. But here you were, about to be a new resident of my apartment, another living creature. A singing creature. A creature with black strikes across your bright chartreuse body and over your yellow head. A parakeet. My parakeet. My baby.
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“Do you have construction workers there for something?” Susie asked on the phone that evening.
“No, my bird is banging his dish.” I gazed at you in your cage observing me in turn, your horns poking up once more. Maybe it’s something all parakeets do? This was the first time you’d banged since we arrived at my apartment some hours before, when I put you on the double-drawered semi-cabinet on my desk and let you adjust for a couple of hours. Before then, I’d kept you busy.
I clothes-pinned to your cage, next to your upper perch, a piece of the Romaine lettuce I’d gotten for you the day before. You ran away from it to the other side of the cage. But a minute later, you sidled over, and over more, until you were finally there. Then – dicing with death – you took an exploratory bite and scurried back away again. A few minutes later you carefully set forth once more, took another bite and raced away from the menacing yet tempting large green leaf. You ran back and forth for another several minutes and then you just stood there eating lettuce until your shit turned green.
“Boy, did you miss salads in your previous life!” I observed.
From that time onward, I experimented with different kinds of vegetables.
Among your favorites over the years was red chard. You nibbled the leaves but tore into the red root until your beak and some of your facial feathers were smeared in fuscia. Your lipstick face. “I see you’ve been at your chard,” I would tell you when I came home from somewhere.
You must have needed red carotinoids because you also buried your face in watermelon whenever I offered it, ripping off little pieces and eating them with gusto.
Then there were carrots.
I cut a carrot off about an inch from the green roots then hung the leafy tops on one side of a bar at the top of your cage and pushed the inch or so of carrot on the other side of the bar, lowering it enough so you could reach it. You gobbled up the green leaves and often scraped at the carrot until it was gone, leaving a pile of carrot shavings on your cage floor.
You also had a thing for rosemary for quite a while. I didn’t think you’d like it because the leaves were so hard, but I decided I’d give you a shot. I watched as you pulled one leaf off, chewed it from one end to the other like a cartoon of someone eating cob of corn from one end to the other; dropped it, then got another. Sometimes your cage floor was littered with carrot scrapings and rosemary leaves.
Then, too, you were very big on broccoli. You liked the stem but loved the little flowers.
Sometimes I got produce I knew you liked, like red chard, as opposed to, say, green chard, which actually on that day looked fresher. But one day I got the fresher, less favorite chard and you really gobbled it up. I realized at that point that you could tell the difference between fresh and not so fresh, and that you preferred fresh non-favorites to staler favorites, when that was the choice. Nonetheless, often I still bought the favorite rather than the fresher produce because it was an idea in my head, this is your favorite, and often my ideas about things – or people – outlive the reality, even once I recognize the difference. This is a flaw I have that affected you in other ways, sometimes to your detriment, including at the end.
Just as it had done with my mother. I thought originally that the hospital was there to care for sick people and that the bad caretakers she had were anomalies, no matter how many there were.
Too late for my mother, I learned the truth.
At the end, with you, I was just beginning to force myself to overcome my preconceptions about what you liked; but at the end, I kept the preconception that I should trust the vet over my own perceptions, instincts and experience.
Today at the produce section of the grocery store and the outdoor farmers market, where I used to seek out roots and leaves and fruits for you, when I was just learning to make a habit of obtaining the freshest produce for you as opposed to only your favorites, but had not quite made the transition – today I race through these places or avoid them altogether. They have become unbearable to me now.
***
I remind myself that a heart breaks because of love, and love is a good thing, and our memories of love are stored in all the chambers of the heart, and they are not broken.
Still, I continue to write them down, just in case.
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Please feel free to contact me with questions or comments.
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