By Scott Sullivan
Editor
Bird Play
I knew it would be a long night when my wife’s parrot hit a bus.
It started when she and our daughter asked if I wanted to take them to get the birds’ beaks and nails trimmed.
No.
“Then you can take us to dinner.”
“C’mon, Dad,” my daughter urged. “Live a little.”
Off we went to Casa la Parrot in Grand Rapids. It was night and raining. Phone Booth, the parrot, rode on my wife’s shoulder; our daughter carried her parakeet in some sort of little breath box.
I heard shrieking outside. “That’s Ezra,” said one of the bird ladies of a white cockatiel when we came in. “He hates men.”
“Only $3,000?” my wife asked, fishing in the empty purse she brings whenever she takes me out.
We’re here to get your birds’ talons trimmed, I reminded her.
“Parrots have nails. They’re not birds of prey.”
Why are we trimming their beaks?
“So they don’t bite as hard,” she said.
Casa la Parrot was crammed with conures, macaws and cockatoos chirping, chatting and crapping merrily. Digested-seed mounds piled under perches. Finally it was over.
As we walked out Phone Booth, who my wife calls her “Velcro bird,” flew off her shoulder across 28th Street, one of the busiest in Grand Rapids. My wife shrieked, looked for a break in traffic and dashed between cars whizzing 50+ mph.
She found a green splay of feathers in the far gutter. A boy there said a bus may have clipped the parrot.
Phone Booth was still living, the bus driver I’m not sure of. Picture piloting a behemoth at night in the rain when a parrot hits you.
“We need to take him to the emergency vet,” my wife said.
Where?
“Take 131 south to 96 east.” She meant 196 I found out after we’d passed it. Cradling the bird, she was pretty rattled.
We doubled back, zigzagging through the city, till we found BluePearl. Last time there I’d dropped two grand to keep our cat, Ash, alive for proved a week, then $300 more to cremate him. Ash’s ashes are still in a tin in my top right desk drawer.
The girls went in and came out. “They don’t take birds,” my wife said. “We’ll have to go somewhere else.”
Off we went to the 24/7 emergency animal clinic on Plainfield, another garish strip lined with car lots and Chinese buffets sporting wilted wontons. This is living? I asked my daughter.
There was a line outside; people stood waiting beside lame animals. We inched forward behind a giant whose chihuahua was in a sling.
We left Phone Booth and my credit-card number with Emergency Vet 2 and dropped off the parakeet at home. There the cats had opened a cupboard and pulled out cereal boxes, spilling them on the floor. The dogs growled at each other through a makeshift fence we’ve placed at the foot of the steps to keep them from fighting, over who’d get to eat the Fruit Loops.
The girls and I squeezed out between the fridge, which my wife bought an inch too wide to fit in the alcove, and half-door with a hole cut in it so cats but not dogs can fit through it. The door opens just partway because returnable cans my wife hangs in bags by a hook impede it, meaning we had to wedge through to escape home and get Italian.
I reflected on how my wife’s high school classmates had voted her Most Likely to Succeed. All I’d achieved was runner-up for Class Clown to a guy whose shtick was as slapstick drunk whereas mine was pseudo-cerebral. I’d never had a chance.
My wife ordered the house wine. “That retarded bird,” sighed our daughter.
“Ah-ah,” Mom corrected. “He’s developmentally disabled. Don’t stigmatize him just because he parrots words but doesn’t know what they mean.”
Who knows what anything means? I said.
My daughter and I ordered what we always get. My wife nibbled on some sort of miscellaneous pasts whose remains we took home in a box that will stay in the fridge till she throws it out.
The parrot came home two days later. What happened? I asked.
“They put him on oxygen and lodged him for observation,” my wife said. “He suffered from shock.”
I get hit by a bus I’m in more than shock, I said before seeing the $600 bill.
“You’ll never concede you lost for Class Clown,” my wife said to defuse my fuming. She gazed on her animal kingdom restored to full madness with love in her heart, a success I may never know.
This column first appeared Nov. 19, 2020, just prior to Thanksgiving Day.
