Champagne Bubble Flock
I live with two birds. Ramses the African Grey is a free-range parrot. He thinks he's a dog. He follows Suzie around the house, perches on one leg at the edge of the dog bed, grooms Suzie's long white hair, shares kibble and milk bones under the kitchen table. Suzie thinks Ramses is a dog, too, thinks Ramses is the beta to her alpha. My other bird is a perky sun conure named Sunny Jordan Gordi. She's a free range parrot, too, but follows my young boys through the house on some kind of bird planet intelligence mission, takes notes under lifted wing, looks like she sends secret messages home. I call her Spy Bird for short.
I don't clip my birds' wings. I rescued both of them, Ramses from an evil pet store, Sunny from a rotting angry old woman, gave them good food and water, large cages to call their own, let their feathers molt and grow, spread and lift. I built them an aviary in my backyard full of manzanita perches and dangling rawhide toys to chew. They spend most afternoons there, talking back and forth, chewing, flying, watching the neighborhood crows steal my macadamia nuts. A good life for a bird. I never close their cages, cover them with soft blankets at night for privacy. They don't try to fly away. My home is the only real life they know.
Friday afternoon I took a shower and put on my good pink dress, the low-cut one with the spaghetti straps and the ballerina skirt. I sang sea shanties in the bathroom, applied mascara and dark cherry lipstick to match my chipped nail polish and thought about my friend the zen monk and the way he called to ask me out to dinner and a movie, the way his voice slightly shook with nervous energy, the way my fingers turned to rose petal curls after he kissed me those months ago in my dirty van on a Los Angeles freeway. Oh yeah, a real date.
I was moving my wallet to my good velvet Avon Kenneth J. Lane purse when it happened. My son, 8, screamed bloody murder, howled in pain and fright, and I dropped my wallet to the floor, kicked off my heels, ran barefoot outside in a pink tornado whirl of satin, saw 8 clutching his heart, staring at the sky, the door to the aviary open, only one grey parrot inside.
"Sunny! Sunny!" I grabbed my heart too, scanned the sky, didn't stop to ask what happened, started screaming for Spy Bird at the top of my lungs. I stuck to that spot, kept calling, yelling, scanning, saw him resting at the top of an enormous torrey pine across the street. He looked tiny, a smudge of yellow against the blue heat of the sky, beak pointed toward the ocean. He flitted down, soared toward the sky again, landed on another tree even further away. He's gone, I thought. He's heard the rumble feather call of the wild. He's gone. I turned around, took 8 in my arms, both of us crying, my mascara running from my cheeks to 8's head.
"It's Ok. It's Ok. It's Ok." I kept whispering nothing words over and over, wanted to calm 8, to calm myself. "Hey, let's sing our birdie bedtime song, ok? Can you sing it with me? Maybe Sunny will hear it and come back. Ok, sweetie? Let's sing."
So 8 and I stood, arm in arm, staring at the sky, at the last tree where Sunny perched, stared and sang our hearts out in the one song we sang every night together, the Good Night song I learned many years ago while watching Lawrence Welk with my Gramma.
Good night, good night
And pleasant dreams to you
Here's a wish and a prayer
That every dream comes true
And now, till we meet again ...
Adios, au revoir, auf weidersehen ... Good night!
We sang that song a hundred times, kept standing and staring, singing until my voice grew hoarse, until the sun began to fall into the sea, singing to the tree, to all the birds of the world. 8 took a deep breath and broke the circle.
"He's not going to come back. Sunny's gone forever." His body shook in grief, and I knew he was right, knew our bird friend would never return. But I took his hand again and held it tight.
"No way, man, no way. He's coming back. We have to believe it. He belongs to our flock, just like Ramses and Suzie and Frankie and Petsy and your brothers and sisters, ok? Just like me. We're his family. And he'll come back. We have to sing him back to his bed. Let's sing it again. Just one more time, OK?"
That last time my voice nearly gave up, cracked with all kinds of pain, but I kept singing, soft and low, imagined champagne bubbles floating behind us, me in my pink tutu, my boy all wistful brown-eyed wonder like some Little Rascal, and as we completed the final "good night" we heard a familiar sound. Sunny. Perched near us, perched on top of his aviary. He climbed to the edge, waited for me to walk to him, to stick out my finger so he could step on up, and 8 and I carried him, sang him inside the house, to his cage where we finished our night time ritual of song and wrapping a blanket around his home so he could rest in peace.
My zen friend arrived then, while we sang Ramses inside, to his bed, too, and he watched us with dark eyes, staring at my tear-stained face. I told him what happened, the miracle of our Sunny's return, and he rolled his eyes.
"Birdie, it's not natural. Birds should not live inside a house. You should have let him go and not called him home. He belongs outside." I looked hard into his face, into the lines surrounding his eyes, knew he held strong views about nature and religion and the cycle of life. He spoke in his zendo quiet voice, gentle and caring and full of mystical knowledge, but I knew he would never understand me, understand my family, my flock, the mismatched ways all of us belonged together, how we all came from some kind of broken existence. He would never get it.
"You know, I am just not feeling well now. Let's take a raincheck on tonight, ok?"
One more closed door, I thought. One more Good Night, Good Bye, Good Riddance. I opened a new box of Rice Krispies, gathered the boys around, and pink tutu and all heated up a pan, added butter and marshmallows. At least I have all of these members in my flock. I watched my oldest son sprawled on the couch reading, heard the gentle night cooing of two happy bedded parrots, saw Suzie curled tight upon her cedar pillow, saw something old and heavy fall out of my heart. Either you get with the flock or you get out. We ate Rice Krispie Treats at the kitchen table, discussed fine points of Star Trek, and for the first time in forever I felt whole.
11:15:02 AM 
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