Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Granny's Budgie

Besides the deck of cards and the glass of rotgut whiskey, Granny’s only other companion was Joey. Joey was a blue-green budgie that resembled a baby parrot. Budgies were a popular pet among older people because they were readily available at almost any pet store, and because they ate only a few seeds a day, they were cheap to feed.
     Joey was a noisy little bird. This annoyed most of us, but Granny, by carefully controlling the volume of her hearing aid managed to tolerate the fowl quite well. When she did decide to permit the squawks to shatter the peace and quiet of the small room, she insisted that she could understand the staccato avian language.
     Joey would squawk loudly and Granny would look at him, nod her head vigorously, and with excited enthusiasm say,
     “Listen, Dad, he’s talking to you.”
     Dad would look up with a mouth full of biscuit crumbs and nod politely and curtly towards Joey.
Joey lived in a chrome wire framed round topped cage supported by a single steel pole. A single span of round wood across the interior served as his perch. The choice of wood as a construction medium was probably an attempt to try and fool the bird into thinking it was a branch, thereby creating the illusion that he was living happily in the wild, inside a shiny steel tree. Joey shared the cage with Jimmy. Jimmy was about the same size as Joey and similar in color, but made of plastic with springs for legs. His feet would be snapped onto the perch, and he would sit there all day motionless, looking wistful, with eyes fixed upon some imaginary horizon. Occasionally Joey would do a little sideways shuffle along the perch to where Jimmy sat, and peck him viciously. Jimmy would sway back and forth on his spring legs but other than that, he would show no sign of interest in Joey. I think that both Joey and Granny were beginning to suspect that Jimmy was not a real bird.

Steve R. Drage
Mud Lane. http://www.mudlane.net/

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