About A Bird

“passer, deliciae meae puellae...” Catullus 3


One morning I was in the bathroom and I heard Juliana call my name, and then call again, and as I sort of hopped to the door she said, “Mr. Smee is dead”, and she was holding his dead body. Mr. Smee was a little gray bird, a cockatiel, whom we had recently taken in. We already had two cockatiels, Chaitzel and Nemo. Chaitzel, though a boy, was named after my great-aunt Chaitze, whose parents changed her name when she was deathly ill as a child so that the angel of death would pass her over. I'm not sure why Juliana gave him that name; I had suggested that of my other great-aunt, Beilah. Nemo, though a girl, got her name from her propensity for hanging upside down with her wings spread and the same sweet, slightly puzzled expression as the early cartoon character Little Nemo In Slumberland, fallen out of bed in his yellow pajamas. The Hanged Man in the tarot deck bears the same expression, as did Stephen Leach when I shot him in a dream.

Mr. Smee was brought to the veterinary clinic where Juliana works, and he had been beaten up pretty badly by some scrub jays. I don't know how Juliana knew then that it was scrub jays, but it was, as Mr. Smee had a high-pitched alarm cry he would give off whenever he heard the “screee screee” of scrub jays outside. You can't really blame him. His feathers were pretty messed up, and he had a scar over his eye. I thought maybe he needed an eye-patch, and then I thought, ooh ooh maybe he could get a little pirate to sit on his shoulder, so we named him Jack Sparrow, but then changed it to Mr. Smee which, though not as funny an image as a little bird pretending to be Johnny Depp in “The Pirates of the Caribbean” is more fun to say.

He was a bit withdrawn for quite a while, I wouldn't say sullen but a little mistrustful. You couldn't really blame him. Then one morning I thought I heard a wolf whistle coming from the birdcage, you know “wheet wheew”. Chaitzel can whistle the theme song to “The Simpsons” and loves to freestyle a mix of other songs I've taught him: “Blue Trane”, “Green Acres”, “The Baby Elephant Walk” and he does this thing that sounds like “My Analyst Told Me”, or whatever it's called, by Lambert, Hendricks and Ross. But he has a warbly whistle, like mine, whereas the wolf whistle was quite sharp and piercing. I heard it again another day, and then I thought I heard, “Jingle Bells” and then one day I was in the room when he did it, the first line of “Jingle Bells”, and he sort of squinted at me, pirate-like: yeah I said it matey. Jingle all the way. Arrrgh.

Then one day Juliana opened a crinkly bag of tortilla chips, and clear as a bell, from the other room Mr. Smee gave his wolf whistle and it took us a moment to realize what had happened and we both burst out laughing: obviously this had once been someone's pet, someone who gave him chips when he wolf whistled. So we--what would anyone do? We went in and held a chip up to the cage, and he came running over and nibbled at it and we whistled at him but he didn't whistle back. Why should he? He already had his chip.

He became more comfortable, and some of his scruffy feathers grew out, though he still had the scar tissue over his eye, and he started singing the second half of “Jingle Bells”, the oh what fun it is to ride part. It's funny about cockatiels, they all pretty much look alike, well not Nemo because she's yellow, lutino it's called, but the gray ones, if you saw Chaitzel and Mr. Smee together you'd have trouble telling them apart, unless you knew to look for the scars around Smee's eyes but the way they stand is different, Chaitzel talky and cocky and Smee a scurvy pirate knave, and anyway one has my quavery whistle and the other a sharper, more piercing one.

Juliana said when she brought him home, oh three birds is the same as two but of course it's not. For one thing we ended up getting a larger cage, one too big and heavy to roll into the other room at night. Also we have, or had, a firm rule in this house: two birds, two fingers. That is to say if I stick my pinky in to give one of the birds a little scratch on the head I have to stick in the pinky of my other hand too. If I scratch Chaitzel first Nemo is quick to invoke this rule, and if I scratch Nemo first then Chaitzel will push her out of the way, and I'll have to stick my other finger in to keep the peace. He's not a very nice brother. Mr. Smee was not above accepting a little head scratch now and then, but it resulted in a complete violation of the two birds two fingers rule. Though I tried, I didn't have the dexterity to master a series of quick hand movements that would create the illusion of no bird being unattended.

Chaitzel did not teach Smee the theme to the Simpsons, nor did Smee teach Chaitzel “Jingle Bells”. He did however teach them to be afraid of scrub jays, and the two other birds would join in when he gave his little high-pitched jay alarm. Though the birds never cuddled up or did anything particularly photogenic, they did refrain from bird fights, which are illegal in the state of California anyway. Smee seemed happy enough in his new home, though I wouldn't call him cheery. I think he was just naturally of a saturnine nature.

And then one day he was at the bottom of the cage, of the new cage that was too big to roll from room to room. Juliana took him back to the veterinary clinic to have an examination on his corpse, a necropsy it's called for animals. Apparently it was his heart, not something that the other birds could catch nor, as I had just assumed, the result of something I did wrong. As I stood in my underwear, staring unbelieving at his little dead body, Juliana said sadly, And now he'll never get to sing “Jingle Bells” for Christmas. And so he didn't.