How Does Your Contentment-o-meter Rate?

My terrier, Lulu, is barking, of course. And it is piercing a hole straight through my skull. Each bark makes my eardrums bow out, pulse and flinch.

I have a parrot on my right shoulder, preening himself. He ruffles his feathers all at once and makes a series of nasally, soft revs and riffs, almost like a very slow and very small dj scratching minute records. Slo-mo dis-co.

When he is really content, he sneezes once and stretches out his leg and his wing on the same side, at the same time. I love that this is called mantling. To spread out, to blush, to cover, to cloak, to conceal. It looks like it feels good. He does this all the time for Jonesy. Tonight, I think was the first time he did it while standing on my shoulder.

The last time I felt as relaxed like he looks was after I took an eight week meditation class where I sat, quiet in one spot, for 45 minutes a day. That was years ago--now my mind is like a tumbling dryer.

He is warm to my cheek, and his feathers tickle where his tail ends and it brushes against my collarbone, a back and forth as he adjusts, wiggles, and keeps an eye on the room. I am not sure if SSW likes one shoulder over the other. He is content to chew the straps of my tank top regardless of the side he is on.

Last summer, when a plane or a crow flew by the sliding glass door where SSW could see them, he would scuttle off the top of his cage, and once inside it, hide, making a series of soft, single-noted, high pitched calls, what I call his eek-scary alarm. Planes no longer bother him, the crows can just shove off for all he cares, and even the terrier's bark is less troubling most of the time. He has gotten so comfortable that even the keeeeeer! of a red-tailed hawk near the house last week did not set off any worries in his tiny skull. What a quick and naive meal he would make; I hate to think about it.

This is not to say he is no longer extremely high strung. No, no. He is a guy who listens for everything, like Lulu. Maybe he doesn't really sleep, but keeps one eye open, like dolphins who swim and sleep simultaneously.

For the rest of us, there is always Ambien or Xanax or beer.

The Messy Truth

Yeah, so he's cute. He lives his life by his beak, as I suppose many of us do, except that most of us don't tend to try to shred everything within reach, and then throw it on the floor.

So.

My kitchen looks like a ticker tape parade, even though I sweep everyday. That's him above actively tearing at the paper that lines his cage. I place magazines inside a shoebox that has a little door cut out of it, so that he can go in there and root around and shred for hours. You know you need to replenish the magazine when most if it is on the floor and he is avidly searching other surfaces in destructo-mode.

It doesn't help SSW's boredom or my inability to keep up with the mess since Jonesy has been utterly unavailable for fun, as she has been studying for the Very Evil Exam, or the VEE. Soon the VEE will be done, and SSW will have his gab-pal back and they can chitter away like two school girls.

Meanwhile today, I, finally, in a small, manic cleaning episode, vacuumed out a kitchen cupboard, where SSW had taken over the drawer above the sieve, Cuisinart, salad spinner, and waffle iron. This was his first take-over of previous public space. He had moved into the drawer and was seen to poke his head out every so often amid the shredding of paper. The paper fell to the shelves below, and sometimes when I didn't hear him, I would open the door below and find him sitting on the colander, shushing me and making himself small and adorable. I let him do this for awhile, then he got bored with the drawer and I wanted the drawer back, so I closed it, and got him a shoe box. Then I discovered he gnawed his way through the waffle iron cord. Arg. And he's not sorry. He would do it all over again if he had the chance.

It's good we don't have cockroaches or mice (yet) from the far-flung crumbs I find under his large nighttime cage. You need the vacuum hose to reach and this is not going to be done every day, for it is a pain in the ass. (Read Providence of a Sparrow if you want to read about a great mouse and moth takeover of a home filled with free-range sparrows and finches.)

The dogs have learned where to scrounge for parrot biscuit bits and dregs of veggies. They help out in any way that they can.

No one but the humans in this house seems capable of tool use. For all the fur the pets shed and food they dribble, it would be swell if they would try and pitch in a little more. Their utter lack of thumbs makes them exempt from every having to learn how to use a broom or a vacuum.

They are very good at sleeping, though, if they could ever get paid for that.

Today I found the headless carcass of a teen rabbit in my yard, being carried around and sucked on by TK, my dog. I don’t think she is the murderer, but only an opportunist. F-cat, a hulking 17 pounds, was lurking nearby. In his younger years, he could decimate an entire litter in one day, and he always ate the heads first. He is now 14, and corpulent, so there has been less rabbit carnage, but maybe this mid-sized bun was more than he could resist. He was a stray, and those hunting habits linger feverishly in his blood.

I picked up the poor, dead thing in a newspaper and placed it in the weeds on the other side of the fence.

You see, I worry. I worry about having a killer cat at the same time as SSW. Since it’s summer, I keep F-cat out of the way of the bird since he likes sleeping on the porch. In winter, though, SSW’s floor ambulation is going to have to cease, unless the fat cat is locked up in a room.

SSW did stupidly land on the cat on the couch once, trying to reach me. F-cat is a tremendously relaxed feline, and sort of just turned his head, with an Ah, well. His insouciance is not to be trusted. I gargled some sort of panicky noise from my throat, and I got SSW to quickly step up. I think he was feeling a bit nervous, himself, landing on the cat though he is known to take an open-beaked approach to the 17 year old cat, we now call the Old Lady, or the OL, because she’s so ancient. But you can’t exactly trust the OL either. She may be senile, but there is still a spark in her eye sometimes.

And the dogs? They tend to part like the Red Sea when SSW comes trucking through. I suspect they do this because they were bit once and because they know I will get very upset if they falter. Lulu takes a half-hearted leap in the air sometimes at SSW when he flies by and this stops my heart for a second.

So one must run interference. If he was bigger, like a cockatoo, I wouldn’t worry so much. But he is only about eight inches tall, and his little toes easily wrap around my pointer finger. 100 grams equals about 3.5 ounces. Mere air, really.

Locking the Bug up in an aviary would only make him sad, lonely, and loud. Locking the dogs out the rooms I am in all the time makes them lonely and whiny and neurotic.

All good advice recommends cats and dogs to not to be in the same room with a bird. The practicality of this stumbles. I do not leave SSW alone with the mammals rambling about with him, however.

SSW doesn’t think he is a bird. He acts more like a mini T-rex. But it’s the mini part that has me in angst, mini against the mighty tooth and claw of a cat.

For the sake of SSW’s safety, when our two old cats die, I will probably not get another, and this makes me terribly sad. Cats are my first true love--sleepy, independent, and sometimes snuggly.

There have to be pound cats out there that wouldn’t give a second glance to a bird, but finding one is too tricky and complicated a matter. Let me know if you hear of any, ok?