Five Times

It's really my fault. It always is. I knew it after I walked out of the room, pissed and hurt, thumb throbbing. SSW bit me five times on my left thumb's knuckle--chomp, chomp, chomp, chomp, chomp. He had been on the floor next to me trying to nail the clean newspapers I was placing around his cage. The big cat walked by and I wanted SSW off the floor; he though, wanted to tell me that this was unacceptable and that yes, he was very riled up and thank you very much for providing your thumb for the proper outlet for his displacement of emotions.


I look at my thumbs and first fingers and they have a small collection of small half-moon wounds in various stages of repair. My coworker asked me yesterday, And why do you have this creature? I smiled and thought of Jonesy.

Jonesy is SSW's right hand parrot-mate. She talks like a pirate to him, which makes him bob his head. They make smoochy noises to each other. He rubs his cheek on her neck. She will type on her laptop with her right hand and let him sit on her left hand, held in the air, like a little prince. They are drinking buddies--he peels the label off her beer bottle and tongues the condensation off the glass. She even has a song for him, which makes him sing along, in his own way, of whistles and shrieks.

But Jonesy works all the time. So SSW is left with she-who-keeps-her-thoughts-to-herself.

So how does the wallflower trait have a corresponding relationship to the frequency of being bitten, you say?

Ach--the math makes perfect sense.

Note to introverts: birds prefer a chatty pal. If you are the silent type, get a cat. This just could be my hurt feelings talking, though. He nuzzles my neck, too, and chortles soft mumbling sometimes. I love to watch him dehusk and eat a snap pea, the large, green pod clasped in his left foot. And you've should've seen him holler in equal volume and excitement at a PJ Harvey cd. As they say, parrots love drama.

He's lucky he's so darn cute.

That Blue in the Periphery

When you wake, the first thing you hear is the wind in the trees. If the wind is down, then the waves, against the red rocks of the shoreline. It is the utter lack of human racket that strikes you, while you are still sleepy, the absence of traffic, voices, car doors, front doors, or dogs (besides your own). You feel yourself unspooling stress after a few days of listening waking slowly, and your posture straightens, your chest broadens, and you sleep more soundly.

And yet, after a few days, after a week, after a month, you must return home. You go back to the landscape of human clatter and few moments of stillness, the remembered lives and work that you have built for yourself.

The lake, the aspens, the blue tongue of the waves all start to evaporate, and you pick up your cell phone, check your email, and turn on the tv. Maybe even your misanthropy rears its head again—there always someone else in front of you, no matter where you go.

When you are not too entrenched in the A to B trajectory, if you sit in your car for one moment longer, hands to the wheel and you look up at the sky, you may come to the conclusion, This is not working out for me.

Yes, there are Thai and Jamaican restaurants near your house, an intricate byway of bike paths, and prairie gardens of native plants in some of your neighbors’ yards. But you can’t stop feeling like you can’t fully inflate your lungs.

You remember, just last week, I saw 10 pileated woodpeckers in three days.

But it is not, as if, your hours away were devoid of all other human-made noises. A car driving down the gravel road, the sound of a hammer far off, voices off the water from a boat, the phone ringing. And at home, there are answers how to push aside the cemented world—you’ve heard about them, tried running, gardening, yoga, meditation, a hike in the woods. No matter, you can find a legion of excuses to prevent you from attending to your core’s quiet refueling. Guilt takes innumerable shapes.

There is just so much talking, so much static caroming around inside your skull, that everything feels tangled, knotted, taut.

But don’t we take our burdens from place to place, that if you are unhappy in one place, won’t you be in another?

So then, how long can you hang onto that smooth stone of tranquility once you return to where you left off?

Vacation without William

Day 1. We get a late start, Jonesy cursing all the pet-made messes. SSW continues to shred paper while we tidy, so when the house cleaning is finished, he has made new flotsam. Circular, endless.

The two dogs vie for who gets to be nearest the front of the car, noses or paws on the armrest. Once we get to the lake, Lulu bursts out of the car, an explosion of barking and leaping. TK smiles and smiles.

Day 2. We drive a half-hour to the grocery store (Ach! we have no coffee!) where Jonsey insists on a chocolate box cake with cream cheese factory frosting. When I make it a few days later, she feels caked-out after a couple of pieces, moaning about how there is so much more to eat. She makes me promise not to let her cajole me into buying another cake to make on vacation.

Lulu rolls on a dead fish and is summoned by Jonesy for a hose-bath outside, which she partakes in humbly, gently, tail-tucked.

Day 3. The dogs are starting to slow down. They stand around sleepy-eyed after breakfast, but then startle alert when you mention the word beach or walk. Anytime we leave the house without the dogs, Lulu shrieks and paces—you can hear her barking move from one side of the house to the other as we get into the car. Her utter belief in abandonment is heartbreaking.

We’ve seen a small village of pileated woodpeckers so far—one bird was stumbling around the tall grass, another above it. This year’s inexperienced broods?

A large porcupine crosses the road in front of our car near the house, a creature in no hurry, so we stop, and I roll down my window to send him salutations as he enters the weeds.

Day 4. Jonesy tried to encourage the dogs to “go enjoy their dogness” out in woods. They prefer to stare at us through the screen door, pleading to be let in.

We go driving without the dogs (since they abhor waiting in the car, preferring to freak out as we walk away), out about the lakeshore, visiting little towns. I stumble around a dusty bookstore of 40,000 titles while Jonesy falls asleep on a wicker couch in the sun. We leave with a Sherman Alexie book,
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.

Day 5. Jonesy finds three grey hairs on my head. I think she is a liar.

Each day, we swim in Lake Superior, a brisk, enlivening experience—quite bracing! as Jonesy likes to say, comparing it to water off England. By now the dogs can barely stay awake at anytime of the day. This is first time I realize TK is old; her legs are unsteady on the lake rocks, she drags her left rear foot sometimes, leaving a nail-trace in the sand.

Day 6. The perfect weather ends—as we start to park the car, it pours. The hatchback had been open to air it out, and before it rained, the dogs sat in the back, looking out, ready to go.

When we get home, it is dark, and our bird-sitter has put SSW to bed. We hear him whispering to himself, and he won’t come out of his cage for me, but immediately runs up Jonesy’s arm. Now it’s clear whom he loves best. And his head bobbing begins.

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?

How Having A Conure Precludes One From Moving to Groovy Brooklyn

Last January I went to NY and stayed with my French chef/poet/fellow cheese freak friend Robin. To show me world class fromage as well as poetry, Robin gave me a tour of Murray's Cheese's underground cheese caves, and we went to a reading at the KGB Bar. Back in her Brooklyn neighborhood, I walked her senior greyhound around the brownstoned streets, we ate delicious food a block from her house (arugula with thinly sliced pears and gorgonzola, a couple of blood orange cosmos, kale-stuffed ravioli served in a broth made of the rind of parmesan), got bagels delivered to her third story walk-up--that lovely apartment filled with light, books, and edible delights. Her apartment was a block from the subway where I had easy access to the likes of the Museum of Art and Design, where I saw a wickedly smart exhibit on embroidery (who knew it could be so cool?), as well as the delicious and famous St. Mark's Bookshop. In the city, we ate chocolate bread pudding in a store that only sold that dessert. I was too full to go to the pommes frites place (dammit! www.pommesfrites.ws), so sad, the two times we walked by. I was awed and addicted to Pinkberry frozen yogurt--tart, light, mine ordered: vanilla with chestnuts and monstrous blackberries, me wanting to order it all over again even as I finished the dish in front of me, me gasping that NY and CA are the only places one can get the stuff. I saw Paul Giamatti, scowling about the Village. I even met a cartooniologist--really! (www.tmotley.com) Ah NY, ah Brooklyn--

I went home after five days, not wanting to go, but Robin and her dog Hazel walked me with my rolly suitcase two blocks from her apartment to a busier road, I hailed a cab, and like that, I was gone.

While I was there, I started to exclaim in front of my hosts, I'm moving to Brooklyn! In my heart's core, however, I knew this to be a lie. Jonesy would never move there--she wants out of cities, not towards. Sometimes I do, too. I have a fear aggressive pup who would be impossible to walk nicely along the sidewalks of the burrough. And her barking tendencies would not make her a good apartment dweller.

And then there is the bird. Oh, loud-mouthed one. He would not make a very good neighbor.

I was implored on my visit by Robin to not talk about how cute SSW was, for her husband Evan needed the littlest of coaxing to begin bringing up again we should get a bird. Robin is wise and knows that a parrot's shrieking goes right through the walls of an apartment. A canary, a cockatiel, but, no no no, do not bring home a conure, dear.

I can hear my own SSW in the summer a block away when the window is open and he sees me leaving with the dogs in the morning. He has ears like a mother listening to her teen sneaking in after curfew (his acute hearing is due, of course, to him being a prey species protecting his feathery bum). Does he hear the dog tags jingling as we return? Does he know which car is mine as I pull up in front of the house? Or does he alarm at any random car door, any person talking/walking by?

So Lulu will live another 10 years probably. And SSW another 30. By then, I'll be 67 and my student loans will be paid off, but by then, the groovy brownstones of Brooklyn will probably be renting for a sum I can't even fathom could be real. And to be the rain on the picnic I am known to be, isn't vacation always so much more fantastic than the actual day-to-day, plod to work, go buy groceries, pay yer bills, that drags any good fun down, no matter where you live?

I could go for some Pinkberry and pommes frites right this minute.