Sky

Sky is our parakeet.  He is another of my middle daughter’s pets.  I call him “he”, but really I have no idea what sex he is though I think it has something to do with the color above his beak.  Sky is mostly blue/green with a yellow head, not exactly the color of the sky unless you’re looking at one of Pixar’s versions, but he is pretty.  He has been with us for about five or six years now.  He replaced another parakeet called Lucky (also owned by same daughter) who did look like the sky, light blue with a white head, but whose star did not follow her name.  I know she was a “she” because she laid an egg.  That news must have traveled around the playground like wildfire because another a soccer Mom that I knew, whose son was a friend of my son’s, called me and told me that she had just successfully hatched some parakeet eggs if I was interested.  “Crap,” I thought to myself.  No way that slid under the kids’ radar.  Sure enough they came home from school chattering about Lucky needing a nesting box and a male companion.  (I’m ignoring my husband’s voice in my head, who wouldn’t let that opportunity for a joke go by.)

My son took me aside and said, “Paeder (his friend was half Irish) said I could have one of his baby parakeets!  Only parakeets grow up really fast so it’s full grown already and a boy!  So he could marry Lucky!  Can I have one?  Please?  I don’t have a pet of my own.”  As if I should feel sorry for him when we had a plethora of animals in the house.  But it was true.  His sister was (and still is) the squeaky wheel, and because she has the stamina to wear down the hardest of hearts, she has three pets to her name even now, at nearly sixteen.  That’s not counting the jointly owned dogs and cat.  So we took the male parakeet, who my son promptly named Falco, I can’t remember why.  Either because it was short for Falcon, or there was a Pokemon or Digimon he was attached to, I have no recollection.  Those are whole periods I must have blocked out.  If you’ve ever been to a Pokemon movie you will understand.  I tried to pawn those experiences off on my husband, but he traveled for work a lot and I actually had to sit through one once.  It was a very long hour and a half, which I mostly spent contemplating bodily harm to Japanese animators.  However I digress.

Falco moved into Lucky’s cage, but the transition didn’t go very well.  Lucky didn’t appreciate her new roommate, nor his interest in her egg.  There was a whole lot of squawking going on and it got so blood curdling that I called Petco to ask about parakeet behavior.  They told me to put the cage in the dark, to quell Lucky’s aggression, so I jammed the cage in the guest room closet and hoped for the best.  Sadly, murder was on her mind, and she pecked poor Falco to death.  (Now I’m ignoring my own voice.)  It was very traumatic for the kids, especially my son.  I tried to explain a mother’s defense of her young, her capacity for violence being great under threatening circumstances.  He was young at the time, maybe ten, but he looked at me with a penetrating gaze and asked, “Could you kill someone that threatened us?”  I looked him straight in the eye and said, “Absolutely.”  That distracted him for a while.

So I threw away the nesting box and Lucky went back to being a single girl.  We were out of town on vacation when my cleaning lady called to tell us she had found Lucky dead on the bottom of her cage one day.  She told the kids she thought the cat had scared her to death.  It certainly wasn’t old age because birds live forever.  It’s true that Sugar doesn’t like being left at home alone, especially if we take the dogs, and might just have been bored enough to terrorize Lucky.  Anyway when we returned home I had to take my daughter back to Petco for another bird, and that’s when we got Sky.  This time my daughter wanted to hand tame her parakeet, having heard stories of mine at her age, who flew around my room and landed on my head.  I could cup him in my hand under the faucet in the kitchen sink and give him a bath.  He was all white and his name was Ivory, a fairly sophisticated name in a house where the dogs were named “Puppy” and cats named “Kitty”.  He could also say “pretty bird” and do a wolf whistle.  So my daughter was eager to train her new bird, which lasted about a week until she got bored.

When we moved back into our house after the remodel, we bought a new cage when we were in Mexico that’s huge, and accessorized the corner of the kitchen perfectly in our Spanish Revival house.  Unfortunately, the door is at the bottom and the cage is so big it’s impossible to get the bird out unless you crouch down on your knees and reach your arm in and up in a really awkward position, face smashed against the bars of the cage, and then you can only catch him if he happens to be on a perch nearby.  So we leave him alone mostly.  And he’s loud and kind of obnoxious during dinner or whenever someone sits at the head of the table, which is often.  “Sky!  Shut up!” they scream, and bang on the cage.  Charlie, who is a very curious corgi, stands on her back legs to reach the cage and puts her nose up to sniff.  Sky obligingly hops down the various perches to her level and pecks her nose.  And now my daughter has long thin arms and can reach the bird so when she is procrastinating her homework, she brings him out and puts him on the kitchen table, resting on a candle, while she skypes her friends.  Occasionally he flies around, eventually falling to the ground with chest heaving.  He’s out of shape from all his confinement.  If something happens to Sky, I’m getting some canaries.  At least their song sounds pretty.