A couple of weeks ago, I tossed out my daily ration of birdseed on the patio for our feathered friends. Approximately two dozen sparrows soon swooped down and in their midst was a brightly- colored green and yellow version. It was too early for Halloween, so could it be a mutant? Actually, it was a parakeet pecking at the seeds with the others. I knew that this migrant from the Carolinas wouldn’t survive a Winter up here, so my wife and I decided we’d best try to catch him. As I approached the feeding flock, the sparrows took off, which they usually do when they hear a sound louder than a blinking eyelid, but the budgie remained.
He wouldn’t let us touch him, so my wife got a large cheesecloth-like piece of material and tossed it over him. She brought him in inside our screened porch. He was rescued, but now what? We generally don’t have a cage hanging around waiting for pigs to fly into it, so we needed to buy one. And food. And a toy or two. And other bird paraphernalia. And something from which to hang the cage to keep him out of reach of our two feline family members, already trying to decide if a drumstick or wing would be a better choice.
So I was off to the hardware store to pick up a long arm plant hanger and then mount it over a window. With the budgie, now named Benny, he was officially adopted.
It didn’t take long before my wife thought Benny was lonesome and needed a friend. This meant another cage for the friend because both birds needed to be separated for a few weeks to make sure neither carried anything to infect the other. So we bought a matching cage so the new guy wouldn’t feel he was less of a bird than Benny. And a toy or two. And any other bird paraphernalia we didn’t already possess. It was another trip to the hardware store for me to get another plant hanger to mount. The cats now figured they wouldn’t have to fight over who gets which part; there was a feathered critter for each. With budgie number two named Jack, he was officially adopted. Jack and Benny.
Our immediate family now consisted of two adopted children, two adopted cats, and two adopted parakeets. Of course, anytime you adopt something live, it’s never free, so I’m hoping I can find and adopt a multimillionaire Arab or two.
- If you didn’t have the opportunity to read Chaz Coddington’s September 7 piece in The Voice, grab it from the bottom of your birdcage. He had some good words to live by. The first were from an old Twilight Zone episode, an allegory on the rise of Hitler, and things we should be aware of to prevent a repeat; things such as name-calling, attacking minorities, and assaults on any human beings. This kind of stuff may have been festering beneath the surface of some people with three fewer brain cells than a golf shoe, but Donald Trump made it okay for this type of human to officially practice the preceding. So we have MAGAs banning books, whitewashing history (see George Orwell’s 1984), and attacking Woke when the majority doesn’t even know what Woke means or is operating on the definition of it from Fox, One America, and the like. The words of Rod Serling, Chaz noted, were originally presented as a caution to Americans.
The second batch of good words from Chaz were his philosophy of life. Namely, treat others as you’d like to be treated and live and let live. Seems simple, right? Why is it so hard to practice? If everyone had that philosophy, imagine how pleasant life could be. But the simple things seem to be the hardest to put into practice.
The late psychologist Dr. Wayne Dyer once told of a new patient who had come to him because she couldn’t stop biting her nails. Her fingers were chewed raw and she’d been in therapy for two years, trying to get at the underlying psychological root of her fingernail obsession. He told her he’d cure her in two weeks. When she asked how he could do that when two years of therapy had failed, he said, “Stop putting your fingers in your mouth.”
For now, I’m going to sit on the back porch, pop open a brew, keep my fingers out of my mouth, and watch for any orphaned critters, winged or otherwise, that may need a home. Other than rich Arabs, I’ll find them a home someplace else.