Most pets we’d had growing up died relatively soon after buying or receiving them and had uneventful departures from my life. My family had had a dog, which we got rid of since he occasionally ran down the planks from our backyard fence and subsequently was caught by the “animal-catchers” (which always sounded so terrible) but after our parents’ spending so much money on bailing stupid Buster from the pound (which was somehow worse, though I couldn’t understand how) he eventually stayed there. Otherwise, we’d usually had angelfish or goldfish and once had a freaked out stray cat move-in, but after receiving painful scratches of reward from the “little shit” (as my step-dad, Ron, would call it) the “damn thing” was taken back to its life of the streets.
I can’t recall which year it was, but I suppose it was my eighth, and for my birthday, I wanted nothing except a pet bird, one that I’d seen at the local Woolworth’s near my grandparents’ house. I was sure to get what I wanted, since I’d been so good in school and church and the bird and it’s cage couldn’t cost more than about thirty dollars. I knew my parent’s sometimes didn’t have money for all we wanted, but my siblings and I could always trust they’d do what they were able. That morning, my hopes were elevated as I ate my favorite breakfast cereal, Lucky Charms, bought especially by mom the night before (she’d usually not let us eat such expensive, sugary cereals) and after school I expected the usual dinner at my grandparents’ house with cake and ice cream.
That evening, I was the first to run through the heavy double-doors of my grandparents’ entryway, scrambling in front of my older brothers, Mike and Jay, and my little sister Sammi while my parents gathered important birthday things from the mini-van. I was crazed, and just spat a hello to my grandpa reading Popular Mechanics or Retired General in his throne of soft, nineteen seventies brown leather, which we weren’t allowed to “horse-around” on. He replied with a hearty, “Hey, happy birthday, Joelie!” as I continued down the hall, past the reproductions of famous Mormon paintings and into the kitchen where I could smell and hear my grandma’s cooking.
“Well, I thought I heard a birthday boy crashing down the hall; Happy birthday, my love”, she said with a hug, thoughtfully not messing my birthday outfit with her kitchen’d hands, “You should go see what’s in the bathtub up stairs”.
I dropped whatever I was told to help bring in the house on the country-colored woven carpet of the kitchen and spun around to run, passing my parents just entering the hallway and closing the front door, “Slow down on the stairs”, my mother warned with a smile, knowing what I was to find upstairs (she was too smart to store any really exciting gifts at home, since I was a snoop). After swiftly climbing the stairs and leaping up to the landing, I rounded to corner to the hall, turned again into the guest-bathroom and reached over to turn the light’s timer dial, to find the doors of the tub slid closed and myself reflected in the mirrored one of the two. I didn’t understand. How could a bird be in the bathtub, and if one was there, how could it be so calm and quiet after I turned on the lights? I was already disappointed. What was it they got me instead?
I had to look. I stepped and gripped the chrome handle of the mirrored door, my now frightened face confirming my disappointment as I slid the door slowly, its old, rusty wheels whining lightly as it rolled, and I hear, “Grock!, ting!” and a bell’s tiny rings: the sounds of a frightened bird. All that followed were crazed wing flapping and a metal cage’s rattle. I needed to move to the other door since the cage was at the other end of the tub. So I heave the door back, leap to the right and thrust the other door open to a slam! Now the bird was absolutely terrified, and I was too, but also curious.
The lights above the mirror and sink on the opposite side of the room emboldened the brassy luster of the cage’s canopy and the clean, glossy brown newness of the cage guard at its base. Awesome. The bird calmed and I was able to see it: a gray and black little Parakeet with a blue flank and puffy white “cheeks” around its beak. I kneeled down to lift the cage by the hook at its crown, to get a closer look at my bird, but this totally freaked it out. Maniacally, it flitted and fluttered about, knocking its water, seed, and its own feathers around and out of the cage. Momentarily, it quieted and just stared at me, then it stepped to the side of its perch to sharpen its beak, apparently to frighten me, which it did, so I turned around, one knee on the fluffy bat mat and set the cage on the toilet. I wasn’t going to bother with him until later. After dinner and its birthday ending with a box cake from mix frosted in the same 9″ x 14″ pan it was baked in, candled and sung around in our traditional American fashion and followed by my favorite ice cream and other presents, none of which I can otherwise recall.
Later that Fall, my grandparents moved to the MTC, or Mission Training Center, to prepare for a later-life mission many able Mormon elders volunteer for or accept when called by the church to do so (they were on their way to South Africa) and asked my mom and Ron if they wanted to move us into their house for two years whilst they were gone, since they were in the neighborhood and only renting our then house. We did. My brothers and I were happy not to switch schools again and finally have a house with at least five bedrooms, so we and our sister could each have our own rooms, this meant I could have my bird in my own room, without the brother I was then sharing a room with complain. The bird was noisy.
It was very bizarre to have a room in my grandparents’ home, especially the one which used to be my Aunt Ginger’s with its mirrored closet doors which held, loosely, her old, outlandish, sequined 80’s fashions still laced through plastic hangers, covered in dry-clean plastics or piled in plastic bags on the closet’s floor. But after we cleared those room’s other items, I was able to move my bird upstairs with me. Actually, I was doubly excited because left in the room was a round table about three feet tall with a decorative iron base and stem, perfect to accommodate the cage and cardboard box of seed-mix.
The white cold Sacramento Winter set in and we realized that my room, with its mauve metal Venetian blinds over a single-paned window, wouldn’t keep my bird warm enough. I felt I needed to do something, so I covered his cage (I dubbed it a male) at night with an old pillowcase and would let him out to fly about my room whenever I had time. This was pretty funny. As he would fly around the room and up the white walls, he’d routinely be drawn to the curious dimension of the mirrored closet doors and fly swiftly as spatially possible toward them and ram beak-first into the glass with all the ticks and clacks of nails, beak and body and crash from there and fall softly onto the thick, brown shag carpet. “That stupid bird” , I’d think to myself, especially after watching that the bird would do this anytime I let him out of his cage. I thought he’d learn, so I let him out to perch on my finger or try playing on my desktop while I drew or did my homework, but he’d always fly over to the closet and most often hurt himself (or so it seemed at the time). He couldn’t have been too badly off for he’d usually return to his loud, needy self in a day or two and the cycle would begin again.
Weeks and months passed, my pet’s limited entertainments became evident, and my want to visit or play with him waned. The weekly cage cleanings became just another chore and spending my allowance on birdseed and cage liners siphoned my Ninja Turtle funds. I found myself focusing on my acquiring those, instead of playing with the live animal caged in my bedroom. I was conflicted and out of patience for this loud, filthy animal. I began to wish it would die. Somehow it must’ve sensed that, for a few weeks after acquiring this new resolve, it did. My mother had stronger feelings about it’s passing than I, but I was really excited to bury it in the yard. I was a young child very fond of formality plus I’d seen Pet Cemetery by then, so it was great to do something so cinematic and closing as burying my little blue bird behind the cover of the great ivy which cascaded from the second story to the ground in the front yard.