(When my budgie died two years ago, I began a letter to him. It turned into a series of letters that is now becoming a memoir. The following is an excerpt of my memoir entitled My Little Bird.)
My Little Bird,
I can see this letter will take many days, maybe even a few weeks. Maybe there will be a few letters. In any case, I must intersperse writing to you with unpacking. Boxes tower and clog my new living room. I will be unpacking them for quite a while. Fortunately, although I will have to move again in a year or two because I cannot afford to remain here, while I stay, there is plenty of closet and cupboard space.
The rooms are also relatively large. I have fit in all my furniture with space to spare. How easily you, my little bird, would have fit. I remember the afternoon I came here and looked around, panicked at such a large step – signing with a new landlord, moving everything, after looking every day for six months. At least the landlord gave me time to look, but being forced from my previous apartment has shattered my sense of stability in the universe.
But this was another one-bedroom, and I saw that there would be lots of room for you to fly around once you learned your way from room to room as you did last time:
Take a sharp right here, a wide left there...onto a perch of some sort, or back to your cage in the bedroom, except the night I didn’t leave the light on...
It would have been stressful for you here at first, being in a new place, but you would have adjusted, like when I had the two desks.
Remember that? One was wide and long, more of an artist’s table, but I used it as a desk; I needed it for the broad surface space. Next to it stood a real desk, a few inches lower and much smaller, but it offered six drawers, three on either side of where I sat. With your cage sitting on the larger desk, you used to run back and forth between the two. Then I purchased a big used scratched stained oak desk offering both surface space and drawers. I gave the other two desks to a charity, placed your cage in the corner of the new one and, as had become usual in the last few years, left your door open.
At first you would come out and race—your waddle reduced by your speed; looking back I can see it was your Power Waddle—to the edge of the new, large desk. You leaned over, looking down in vein for the other desk. Auk! Auk! Auk! you went, as if to say, indignant and highly irritated, “Where did it go? What did you do with it!” You turned to me. Awk! Awk! But after a week you stopped squawking, instead, running around your cage on the new desk to talk to your various mirrors.
You started with the square one at the top of the orange plastic ladder that hooked onto your cage on the outside, climbing up to peck and chirp at your reflection. Then you raced over to the rectangular turquoise-framed mirror a little distance away lying on its side on the desk. Then, bouncing happily back into your cage, you leapt to the mirror attached to the dish that held your food pellets, and hurried from there to your top perch and your favorite mirror, the round one – yellow on one side, turquoise on the other – on the hanging yellow perch next to the produce I cloths-pinned to the bars of your cage. Then out of your cage you popped, and back you charged to the ladder mirror; all heavy action while chirping furiously at the reflections you thought were other birds. You’d become thoroughly used to the new arrangement.
Sometimes I placed my chin on the desk edge and you ran back and forth between your mirrors and me. With each visit to my face you pecked the small knob on the left side of the tip of my nose. Each peck was a little harder, more excited, so that finally before there was serious pain I raised my head, smiling. You returned two or three times, looking around for my nose knob, then just remained with your mirrors. You would soon have been happy in this new apartment, too.
In fact, all three my apartments, including this one, were quite a leap – or a flap – from your first homes.
Do you have any memory of them? Sometimes you cocked your head and looked upward, your expression thoughtful. What profundities did your mind visit? Were you working out some new philosophy? A mathematics of quarks and fractals, chaos and harmony? You looked so contemplative! I chirp therefore I am.
Or were you remembering?
Did you ever dream about the places you stayed before you came to live with me – the pet store and then the hospital?
Today, in the shade and slight breeze, I recall how without warning you came into my life—at, of all places, the nursing care hospital where my mother went for rehabilitation, to learn to walk again, following her hip replacement surgery.
Certainly, seeing you there, I found one of the biggest surprises of my life. Who could imagine I would discover a treasure in that dread abode?
[To read the first 25 or so pages of my memoir, please go to alexawolfonline.com and scroll down to My Little Bird. When the subpage comes up - My Little Bird Excerpt #1 - click.
I would love to hear from other bird lovers how you feel about my work.)
My Little Bird,
I can see this letter will take many days, maybe even a few weeks. Maybe there will be a few letters. In any case, I must intersperse writing to you with unpacking. Boxes tower and clog my new living room. I will be unpacking them for quite a while. Fortunately, although I will have to move again in a year or two because I cannot afford to remain here, while I stay, there is plenty of closet and cupboard space.
The rooms are also relatively large. I have fit in all my furniture with space to spare. How easily you, my little bird, would have fit. I remember the afternoon I came here and looked around, panicked at such a large step – signing with a new landlord, moving everything, after looking every day for six months. At least the landlord gave me time to look, but being forced from my previous apartment has shattered my sense of stability in the universe.
But this was another one-bedroom, and I saw that there would be lots of room for you to fly around once you learned your way from room to room as you did last time:
Take a sharp right here, a wide left there...onto a perch of some sort, or back to your cage in the bedroom, except the night I didn’t leave the light on...
It would have been stressful for you here at first, being in a new place, but you would have adjusted, like when I had the two desks.
Remember that? One was wide and long, more of an artist’s table, but I used it as a desk; I needed it for the broad surface space. Next to it stood a real desk, a few inches lower and much smaller, but it offered six drawers, three on either side of where I sat. With your cage sitting on the larger desk, you used to run back and forth between the two. Then I purchased a big used scratched stained oak desk offering both surface space and drawers. I gave the other two desks to a charity, placed your cage in the corner of the new one and, as had become usual in the last few years, left your door open.
At first you would come out and race—your waddle reduced by your speed; looking back I can see it was your Power Waddle—to the edge of the new, large desk. You leaned over, looking down in vein for the other desk. Auk! Auk! Auk! you went, as if to say, indignant and highly irritated, “Where did it go? What did you do with it!” You turned to me. Awk! Awk! But after a week you stopped squawking, instead, running around your cage on the new desk to talk to your various mirrors.
You started with the square one at the top of the orange plastic ladder that hooked onto your cage on the outside, climbing up to peck and chirp at your reflection. Then you raced over to the rectangular turquoise-framed mirror a little distance away lying on its side on the desk. Then, bouncing happily back into your cage, you leapt to the mirror attached to the dish that held your food pellets, and hurried from there to your top perch and your favorite mirror, the round one – yellow on one side, turquoise on the other – on the hanging yellow perch next to the produce I cloths-pinned to the bars of your cage. Then out of your cage you popped, and back you charged to the ladder mirror; all heavy action while chirping furiously at the reflections you thought were other birds. You’d become thoroughly used to the new arrangement.
Sometimes I placed my chin on the desk edge and you ran back and forth between your mirrors and me. With each visit to my face you pecked the small knob on the left side of the tip of my nose. Each peck was a little harder, more excited, so that finally before there was serious pain I raised my head, smiling. You returned two or three times, looking around for my nose knob, then just remained with your mirrors. You would soon have been happy in this new apartment, too.
In fact, all three my apartments, including this one, were quite a leap – or a flap – from your first homes.
Do you have any memory of them? Sometimes you cocked your head and looked upward, your expression thoughtful. What profundities did your mind visit? Were you working out some new philosophy? A mathematics of quarks and fractals, chaos and harmony? You looked so contemplative! I chirp therefore I am.
Or were you remembering?
Did you ever dream about the places you stayed before you came to live with me – the pet store and then the hospital?
Today, in the shade and slight breeze, I recall how without warning you came into my life—at, of all places, the nursing care hospital where my mother went for rehabilitation, to learn to walk again, following her hip replacement surgery.
Certainly, seeing you there, I found one of the biggest surprises of my life. Who could imagine I would discover a treasure in that dread abode?
[To read the first 25 or so pages of my memoir, please go to alexawolfonline.com and scroll down to My Little Bird. When the subpage comes up - My Little Bird Excerpt #1 - click.
I would love to hear from other bird lovers how you feel about my work.)