Sparrows, Chickadees and a Wren

Did you know there are birds awake at 4:30 in the morning? Well, there are. Cheerful birds. At 4 freakin 30. They sit in the tree outside my window chirping, chirping, chirping. Meanwhile I lie in bed wishing they’d shut the hell up and I could go back to sleep. But, of course, they don’t and I don’t. I just lie there looking at the shadow the leaves make on the muslin curtain as it gently bellows up and back; a breathing canvass. I lie there wondering if the birds are really as happy as they sound. After all, what does a melancholy sparrow sound like?

At 5 o’clock I harrumph my way out of bed and down to the kitchen. By now the chickadees are going at it – chick-a-dee-dee-dee-dee and I like them better because it seems to me they have something to say, unlike the frivolous sparrows who are probably just gossiping. I make myself a cup of dark, thick coffee and enjoy a rare moment with the sliding glass door wide open, Sweet William still perched in his bed, safe from escaping, safe from himself. And he’s quiet – another rarity.

There’s a small dog curled up like a furry little comma at my feet -- a tiny, spotty, smelly, skinny dog. She rolls over, begging for love. On her belly there’s a fresh Frankenstein slash of a scar and it reminds me that she’s been through hell. She’s been over bred, neglected, starved and who knows what else. It reminds me that people are capable of incredible cruelty and I wonder what I’d do if I ever met the woman who abused and neglected her. But that’s probably never going to happen and for all my imagined bravado I’d more than likely just turn away, disgusted.

They named her Ya Ya (she’s a Chihuahua mix) at the shelter where she just came from, the good place with the good people who rescued her from her very bad situation. We named her Wren, so she’s now Wrennie Ya Ya. It seems to fit her. Serious, but she wants to be fun. And she will be fun, once she heals up. I won’t go through the list of her maladies but let’s just say that she takes more pills than Elvis. For a while we had medicine bottles and ointments all over the kitchen but then Sara arranged them in a bowl, the bottles and tubes sticking out at angles, arranged like a Harry and David gift basket.

She’s now sleeping at my feet, sprawled trustingly on a floofy bed, snoring. I can’t help but marvel at her resilience – abused for years but still ready to accept love. And a comfortable bed. A belly scratch also goes a long way. So I’d better get busy, there’s lots of belly scratchin’ to make up for.

In Lieu of Jonesy

I know it's just not the same, and I am not really very funny like she is, but here I am. The parrot loves her best, and I write more on the blog.

I am currently boiling down rhubarb with sugar into a sauce to make, in the future, an Edwardian Pink Shocker. I am not joking: http://www.pbs.org/manorhouse/treats/prog04.html On this site, you can take the Snob Quiz as well. Who said PBS has no sense of humor?

The bird is pacing on his perch, wings out and in and out, trying a series of different calls to get my attention. Now he is pretending to chew. The cat is pawing at the glass door, the dogs are watching the yard for intruders. The ancient cat just limped into the kitchen for a snack.

I am thinking about how if I knew what was good for me I would give up sugar, booze, whining, driving, butter, starch, swearing, and fried foods. Alas, I am flawed.

Just like my pets are flawed--just now the dog nipped the cat and the other dog nipped the nipper. This resulted in scolding. The old cat is oblivious, moving soft food around in her dish from side to side.

My parrots nails are too long, I bite mine, I cannot clip my dogs' nails due to their utter refusals. We all keep making more.

I should go for a walk, read some poems, eat an apple.

The old cat wandered off and now is yowling from the basement, which sounds mournful, like she is lost. I will go retrieve her bony self and squeeze her a little, so that she will start to purr and we will look out onto the yard and whistle back at the birds.

Post Earache

I have resurfaced. For a few weeks, the mere heft of dragging my muscles and bones from one room to the other had me flummoxed and exhausted. Velocity stalled, stuttered.

Today I got my appetite back, and coincidentally, said goodbye to the last of my antibiotics. God bless drugs to squelch ear and throat infections.

The dark chocolate with espresso beans is kaput. I gobbled almost an entire small pizza. The bird gnawed at the crust, always using his left food as the grabber, the right foot as the stander. His eating foot always looks like he's making a fist. I love this. Then he bit Jonesy quite hard for having a water bottle too close to his body as he clung to her collar as she drank.

He bites when he's tired, and he was up way past his bedtime, which is 7 or 8, so he can get 12 hours of sleep, like any good tropical bird should. Up an hour or two past his tucked into his box time. I wonder if we left him up as late as he wanted if he would go to bed ever, or crash out in corner like a kid at a slumber party?

This leads to this question: Can the bird make the best choices for himself? Like flying outside, so No. For wanting to eat more nuts than he should eat in a week: No. Biting the hand that feeds you: No.

But he's a Smoocher, a Snuggler, a Dancer, and Singer, and a Scamp. He nods in affirmation of the list. He says, Djesssss.

A mercurial, contradictory creature. Indeed.

Movie, Cake, and Birds

I just started to get a sore throat. I noticed it while I was trying to savor a slice of flourless chocolate cake my friend John made, while simultaneously watching the movie Old Joy. The movie is a lot like Rivers and Tides, but with two humans and a dog in it and a little bit of dialogue. So of course, I adored it. The dog, Lucy, carries different sticks in her mouth throughout most of it.

Earlier, I had been thinking about someone who offered me her sun conure this week with no hesitation after she heard I had a dusky-headed. She wasn't kidding, and I totally know why. I told Sue about her and she said, too, Yeah, I know what she means.

Volume.
Mess.
Demands.

I guess you can hear a sun conure for blocks away, the loudest and most colorfully plummaged of the wee parrots. My hearing at breakfast is already challenged as I try to enjoy a cup of tea and toast. It seems we have trained the bird to scream while we eat so that we will give him a bit of our food. It's delightful. I am not one who can even make sentences for a half hour or so after waking, so the shrieking takes a lot to just be.

Charm.
Silliness.
Vivacity.

He shuffles around on the floor like a small man looking for a ride or for directions to the bus stop. Are you going that way, he asks? And when it gets dark, he ambles into his cage and into his shoebox, where he peeps and tweedles and shushshh's til my heart is aflame with love. How small a creature, how large his insistence and how great the affection.

Why Bother?

Slow pitch softball is a sport like none other. By that I mean it’s not really a sport. Not the way I play it, anyway. I stand out in right field, glove at the ready, with the mantra in my head: I will field the ball. I will not shame myself. A typical play goes like this: At the crack of the bat I crouch forward, poised for action. I am relieved when the ball tings off the aluminum bat and rockets straight for the 3rd baseman, who scoops it into her mitt easily, then in one fluid motion raises her arm up, hand behind her head and sling shots the ball across the infield hitting the bull’s eye of the 1st baseman’s glove with a confident thwack, long before the doomed runner even gets close. I am relieved because this is something I cannot do, the scooping, the slinging and definitely not the confident thwack. When I throw the ball it either bounces off the ground hard before making it to the target or lofts up gently creating hardly any sound at all as my teammate easily catches it. That is, she catches it if she doesn’t get bored waiting for the throw to reach her and lose focus.

When at bat I modify my mantra only slightly: I will hit the ball. I will not shame myself. The good thing is that most of the time it works. I’m a solid base hitter, if only because the pitch is often not the only thing that is slow in slow pitch softball. More often than not I hit the ball into the zone between the infield and outfield and then just run like hell. If I’m lucky the outfield is populated by those too slow and unskilled to play the infield and even though I feel like one of those cartoon characters with legs spinning round, trying but failing to gain traction (I can almost hear the sound effects), I make it to 1st base. It used to bother me that no one shouts ‘Heavy hitter!’ or ‘Look alive outfield!’ when I step up to the plate, but I’ve lowered my standards. Now I’m just pleased if I don’t have to pretend that I meant to bunt.

So, the logical question is, why bother? I mean, it certainly isn’t for exercise since most of the running I do is between the bench and right field. I’d like to say it’s to have fun, and I do have fun shouting for my teammates, but that’s not it. I suppose I do it do it because at any moment in the game I could completely screw up, but in general I don’t. The potential for error in front of a crowd makes my heart beat a little faster, makes me focus on that moment and no other. In my daily life I’m too comfortable and life, the way I see it, is all about taking risks. It might seem small, the playing of a game, but nothing makes me feel alive like the possibility of shame.

Startled Awake

A few times I have been waiting at a light, completely immersed in the minutiae of my thoughts, in the rabbit warren of mental static, churning, falling into that place of, what is it?--that cognitive grind? A few times I have waited at a light and a flying creature is what startled me out of my head. A highway hawk on a sign, a kestrel twitching its tail from a telephone line, a turkey vulture riding an air current, an eagle's white head bright against the green of a tree.

Or maybe I wasn't stopped but driving the time a hawk nearly flew into the windshield of the car in front of me. The driver's body suddenly erect, alert, awake from whatever waking slumber he was in.

And then there are the crows that fly along with you, at the same speed as your car, coasting along as if it were easy, just hardly something worth noticing really, but they want you to see them, to witness the grace and humor and wonder of going forward like you, but above you. Air an afterthought. What could be simpler but feather + wing + flight?




Dickinson wrote: "I hope you love birds, too. It is economical. It saves going to heaven." That spark in the heart seeing a creature so different from yourself--unbound, spontaneous but programmed to sing or croak or shree--that it transmogrifies you each time you realize this, a shift in your whole thought pattern, if only for a minute, an entrance to the other, the whiff of the present tense, again and again and again. Even the house sparrows give reason for joy--how could they not, even in their common plumage? For it is not a small thing to gather air, and rise.

Dear Fine Blog Reader

We, the management, would like to apologize for the delay. We appreciate your business.

In these few past minutes, it's raining, thundering actually. My little terrier is panicked, even on her Prozac. She prefers the Xanax, the zapper of anxiety. Well, who wouldn't? I mean, the small white pill evaporates the chatter in her nerves. Poor boo.

We are listening to Sigur Ros as it thunders. The bird is in bed. Maybe he wakes when the rumbling starts, but he doesn't peep from his room. Maybe his pupils dilate. When he gets scared during the day, he sits up straight, his feathers flat to his body, his torso and head still, as if he's listening for the turn of the planet. Then, at a cue known just to him, he relaxes, slouches a little, hunches his shoulders like he's ready to slack off. Or maybe fly over to his box in a bag and shred some magazines.

All in all, he's really just a small alien to me. A little green man. Jonesy's figured out the code, the mishmash of language he speaks. Me? I'm the mama who's a tad bit distracted, trying to type as the bird regurgitates on my pinkie. He scuttles across my keyboard, silencing the speakers or closing files or diminishing frames with his quick pace. His warm, scaled eight toes, briefly on my hand--a hey, a message from the avian to the human to say hello back. He means it, or he'll go on next to eat the computer cord or the mail. Then who's in charge, eh?

Love Triangle

I don’t know if all birds are perverts, but Sweet William sure is. I discovered this disconcerting fact soon after he came to live with us, not by catching him in the act, but by being the object of his attention. Well, not exactly me, but my knuckle. He sat on my finger, which is innocent enough, but then maneuvered himself around, straddled the knuckle of my thumb, made a happy, chortling sound and just went to town. I wasn’t sure exactly what was going on at first, (oh how naïve I was), but he sure did. Yep, he’s a bird who knows his way around a knuckle.

Initially I just let him do it – he is, after all, an incarcerated bird, a being who knows the magic of flight, yet is forbidden to soar. How would you feel in the same situation? Angry? Frustrated? Like you might just get your jollies wherever possible? So how could I take away any simple joy?

Foolishly I told a friend about this less than endearing habit. She raised her fist in the black power pose and shouted, “Power to the parrot!” That would have been fine once, but a week or so later I ran into her at the market and she did it again, this time adding a knowing smirk. The chortling, the smirking -- it all made me feel dirty, so I had to break up with Sweet William.

But that wasn’t easy to do, after all, we couldn’t sit down and have a heart to heart discussion, me telling him that it’s not him, it’s me, all the while both of us knowing it’s him. I had to be even more manipulative. The next time he decided to get intimate I rotated my hand so he had a less advantageous position which caused him to scream and bite me, angry for the interruptus. He didn’t give up easily. He made his move again and again, each time suffering the same dissatisfaction. So, thankfully, he finally went off in search of a more willing partner. Which he found in a tube of chapstick.

The courtship.

One morning Sweet William was busy shredding an oven mitt and since destruction is his favorite activity (or perhaps second favorite) he was content, leaving me to drink my coffee in peace. It was a morning like most others until I heard his happy chortling ‘I love your knuckle’ sound. I turned around quickly, catching him in the act with a tube of Burt’s Bee Balm chapstick. He was straddling it, scooting it across the counter, pushing it forward, rolling from side to side, oblivious of all else around him. He eventually pushed the object of his desire over the edge of the counter, hanging on for just a second the way Slim Pickens rode the nuclear bomb in Dr. Strangelove. Then he took flight, landing on the floor near his amour.

He caught up with the chapstick, straddled it (her?) and carried on as before, perhaps a little more aggressively, pissed off about the chase. Now he had much more room to roll around and he skittered around the floor, chortling and occasionally shrieking, oblivious to the ancient cat who could probably still have him for a snack.

But this isn’t the end of the story. Later in the day I caught him cheating on the chapstick with an empty Advil bottle. Now he goes back and forth between the two with no clear favorite, his attentions doled out liberally to each. They all seem ok with it; the advil bottle, the chapstick and Sweet William. As long as he leaves my knuckle out of it, I'm happy for him and his love triangle.

Occasionally you wake and crave something or somewhere you haven't thought about in a long time. Maybe your subconscious has been rolling it around for awhile, who knows, but then one day, the nostalgia or wishfulness or flat out craving arises. A few weeks ago, I dreamt about the verdant, quiet saltwater estuaries along the Southern coast, with their meandering creeks, the long-legged wading birds, the sound of air popping from the muddy banks, and the occasional surfacing dolphin.



On another plane of wanting, this past week I saw a sad, scared conure at the shelter, not yet up for adoption, shaking in its cage, unhappy at my cooing near it. It had a splotchy yellow head, so maybe it was a sun conure x'ed with something else, like a Jenday. I heard on internet that they are called Sun-days. How cute. How perfect. How too much.

I have written before at length why I won't get another bird. I know the logical and logistical reasons for my No. These factors don't factor in emotion, especially ones inflated by walking around a shelter, where we got Bug in the first place.

And the logical and logistical have no say in wanting to kayak in the marsh, to drag your fingers in the warm water, either.

The murky weather of the brain vs. the tick-tock, stay on task mantra of living as a day-to-day human often don't mix very well.

Day After Day

I was offered a job yesterday. One would think that being offered a job after two months of unemployment would make me happy. One would think. But instead, I was more depressed than before.

Picture a low-end used car dealership. Now take that image and grunge it up a little more. Focus your attention on the perma-grime around the light switch, the chipped plastic table and clunky metal chairs, the jagged rip of the veneer on the inside of the bathroom door in the shape of Africa, or a profile of Martha Washington. So hard to tell which.

Used car dealerships all have a certain smell, something like WD-40 mixed with bubble gum. When I left the interview I couldn’t get that smell off me all day. It was in my clothes, my hair, the folds of my brain. It's never really bothered me before, but yesterday I felt a little sick every time I caught a whiff of it.

Before my dad moved up to the bigger league of the new car business he owned a used car dealership. He actually had a couple of different car lots, but the one I remember most was called Bear Motor Company. I remember it as a low-end, grungy place too, but not depressing. It was where my dad poured his energy and made his money. He always seemed happy at the car lot.

I worked for him one summer, checking fluids, detailing cars, running errands and other odd jobs. Many of my tasks required me to get inside the vehicles, some of which smelled like vomit, others like sweat, air “fresheners” or fast food. I began every morning by starting each vehicle. I’d open the door, wait for the heat to escape and then take the biggest breath I could muster, hop in, turn the key with a silent prayer and try to start it without breathing. The stench was too powerful to even mouth breath so if the engine wouldn't fire quickly enough I'd have to get out, gasp and jump back in for another try.

One of my other jobs at the lot was to clean out the cars Dad bought or took in on trade. I found a $20 bill once. I also found a used tampon, half a burrito, a dirty diaper and a comb that looked like a switchblade. Hardly a winning hand. Ok, so maybe it was a little depressing.

I turned down yesterday's job offer which means I won’t be keeping the books at the sad little used car dealership, but I also won’t be working at all. Any idea what it’s like to be out of a job for two months? It’s like when you have a cold, stay home from work and wear your pajamas for the entire day. That evening your hair’s still messed up and you don’t know exactly what to do with yourself. You feel like eating dinner is kind of weird – after all, you didn’t do anything all day. It’s like the dull thud of the melancholy of a Sunday evening. It’s like you’ve lost a good friend. It’s like going to the funeral of someone you don’t know. Day after day.

When A Quiet Saturday Night is Enough

The bird has been put the bed, the dogs are asleep on the couch and floor, Jonesy is out on the town. It's just me, the heater kicking on, and mint ice cream calling from the freezer.

During the week, I don't get much silence, much empty time to be alone. My head is full of static, I forget to breathe fully (by the end of the day, a series of huge exhales ushers forth), and I watch a lot of rented movies to unwind.

When I get home from work, the bird is screaming, the terrier is leaping and yelping, and sometimes the old cat is crying in the basement. After watching a few episodes about the heavily boozed characters on Mad Men, I see the attraction to vodka. But then their excess tips into obliterative, and well, I just can't compete. I'd rather have a good nap. Liquor up, Ad Men.

The absence of household chaos, the lack of cacophonic competition--this is a humble goal. The night is quiet, especially the later it gets. I turn off lights to not bother the napping hounds, and my brain rests a minute, sighs.

I am to blame, I have created this slow crescendo with each new pet: quiet cats for years, then a dog who rarely barked, then another, louder, but not too loud dog, then a terrier mix thrown in who paces and whines and frets and barks, and then, then, then--then the minute we decide, Yes, we will take that small green bird home from the humane society, and how he screamed and screamed and screamed when we got him home--how his wings were clipped and we were in other rooms sometimes than he was (it could not be helped as one has to move and eat and clean), and I thought my head would fissure, and I had the flash, We can just take him back, yes we can.

Jonsey said, calmly: We made a promise to him to feed and protect him for his whole life.

It was the sudden turned up volume in the house that caught me off guard. This level of calling and insisting? Really?

Really.

You adjust your ears' expectations. It becomes What You Know.

But a quiet night at home, delicious. Magnificent.

The Wrath of Grape

Sweet William stole a grape this morning. He grabbed it off the counter and tore into it right away, his little pupils dilating and contracting so rapidly that it looked quite comical – in, out, in, out, whoooo! Attempts to take the grape away ended in threats of violence so I gave up and watched him devour what looked like a reddish-purple bowling ball in his tiny talons.

I wonder if he’ll regret it when the excitement wears off and he’s left with an aching gut. Or will he feel fine, smug even? One thing is for sure he’ll be doing you-know-what like Niagara Falls soon enough. Imagine eating a 5 pound watermelon for breakfast. My guess is, you wouldn’t want to stray too far from the small room. And I wouldn’t want you sitting on my shoulder.

Conures With Socks

It's not surprising that parrots, or birds in general, don't wear socks. How would they perch, and wouldn't their nails get caught in the fabric?

If socks weren't so ergonomically challenging, Bug could use some in the winter--sometimes when he steps up, his feet are cold. And then I feel bad that his whole, small torso's shivering. Occasionally he steps in his poop, so the socks scenario gets further complicated. Toed socks with grippy bottoms like those slippers one can buy?

His species is from South America, where birds don't need footwear if you live in the jungle. Sometimes he stands on one foot, the other tucked into the electric green of his vent feathers. Whether he lives in the land of snow or tropics, I am pretty sure that behavior wouldn't change. Up here, however, it probably serves to warm his little phalanges.

My own socks, my favorite Smart Wools, have taken a turn for entropy this winter. I've lost about half my pairs to the Rift Phenomenon: the heels wear out where the thicker heel stitching transforms to the thinner vertical material at the back of the heel. Which then equals: a hole.

I can't seem to throw these broken socks away. They cost a lot but I don't darn, like my grandmother did. Wouldn't the repair create a line/scar that would rub the skin like a too tight pair of shoes on the heel, where you'd have to wear a bandaid?

And sometimes Bug bites my socks and creates his own new holes.

I guess we are between a sock and hard place.

Lunch

When I was about 12 years old my mother gave me a diary and told me to keep my secrets in it. It was tiny -- no bigger than a birthday card, no thicker than my two fingers. Two fingers of secrets. It had a cloth cover with brightly colored flowers all over it, altogether too jolly for the darkness I wanted to unload. But it did have a lock, which gave its contents, no matter how frivolous, an elevated importance and made writing in it a clandestine act. I wrote in it furtively, hiding under my bed, and never committed anything I didn’t mind my brother reading. It was a flimsy lock.

Sister Annette made us keep a journal in our senior writing class. When I asked her what the difference between a diary and a journal was, she told me that we would get class credit for writing in a journal and she didn’t care if we kept a diary or not. And a journal doesn’t have a lock.

She told us we could write anything at all in our journal as long as we “wrote with new eyes.” We were forbidden to write about anything ordinary or to echo the thoughts of anyone else. By way of example, she told us we could write about the curve of a tree or the veins on our grandmothers’ hands, except we couldn’t now because she’d just mentioned those two things. But the biggest rule was that we could not write about ordinary things, that we could not -- repeat, could not, write about what we had for lunch. Just knowing that made me hyper aware of food. I became obsessed with the grainy texture of applesauce, the burnt sienna halo of the grease surrounding the sloppy joe meat, the salty, crunchy hammocks of fritos in the frito pie. I kept all of these observations locked away from Sister Annette. Being so contrary, it’s little wonder I didn’t become a food writer.

If Sister Annette were around now I’d love to ask her what the difference between a blog and journal is. I have to imagine she’d tell me that you don’t get class credit for a blog and the ban on writing about lunch is lifted.

And a blog doesn’t have a lock.