Once Upon A Time - A Story From The Past #1

Once upon a time in a land far away. Actually, it was far away, and hot. Before Brian and I had any children we lived in Pensacola, Florida. Why? Well, that's a story for another time. Anyway, We lived in a Tri-plex apartment between a nice similarly aged couple on one side and a white boy wanna be rapper and his hoochie girlfriend on the other. We didn't have a lot of money or a vacuum. (don't ask why I thought about the vacuum bit, but it popped into my head.)

One day, after our neighbors got a cute little puppy we started thinking, "Hey, maybe we should have a pet too." Well, we knew we didn't want to fool with a puppy (too much time and money) and Brian has a genetic aversion to cats, so it had to be something a little more low key. We went and scoped out the pet store. Brian thought the Ferrets were "cool", but they were too rodent like for my taste and that meant NO Ferrets for us. We checked out the aquarium side of things, which resulted in a discussion about how big of a tank we should have, pumps, chemicals, fish, cleaning a fish tank, baby fish, who would get stuck cleaning a stinky fish tank, etc. Never mind that idea, we're not fish people either. Then we got the bright idea to look at birds. Oh yes, birds are so nice. They just sit there in their cage and chirp sweet songs. Once in a while you can take them out of their cage and have them sit gently on your finger (aka: getting out of the cage and taking a potty break on your owner), birds are lower maintenance because you can leave them at home all day while you're at work and they won't chew up your house. You don't have to take them on walks, in fact it's not even recommended that you take them outside at all! Wow, we thought, a bird seems like the perfect pet for us. So we bought a lovely little parakeet, a cage, food, a cute little mirror toy, and some millet. The nice man at the pet store even instructed us on how to clip our little birdy's wings so that it couldn't take flight and leave us. Since we didn't have any children, we set up our new little bird's cage in the 2nd bedroom of our 2 bedroom apartment. I still have no idea why we decided to do that instead of putting it in our living room or something, but that's what we did. We decided to name our little birdy "Millie" because she seemed to love eating the Millet that we bought her. So, now we were set. We were proud pet owners. We got a book that told us all about how to go about "training" our bird to interact with us, how to care for it, and the history of Ornithology, and an index.

We set out to make our new little pet comfortable and happy. We practiced handling her and letting her take a bird bath in a pie plate. She seemed so happy. We hung her little toy in her cage, it was a mirror. The idea behind that was while we were away from the house at work, she could look in the mirror and see another bird, and since birds are not smart enough to know better, she would think that she had a friend and she wouldn't be lonely! What a Master Plan!! Even our bird owners book said that it was a good thing to do. After about a week, however, we noticed that Millie didn't want to come to us, she didn't want to be OUR friend because she liked her little mirror bird friend better. This was a problem. We bought that bird to be OUR pet!! OUR friend! and no mirror toy was going to spoil it for us! Our bird owners book said that this sort of thing may happen and that we needn't worry it was easy to remedy. Just take the mirror toy away and then she'll be so lonely that when you come home and try to spend time with her she will be overjoyed and relish the idea. So, that's just what we did. We removed the toy.

One Wednesday evening, before church Brian thought he'd get our lonely little bird out of her cage and spend some time with her. After all, she's supposed to want to be with us right?? She's lonely. At first, she didn't want to get out, but after trying for a while, she finally changed her mind and perched on Brian's finger. She seemed content and all was going well. I went to finish getting ready for church and when I came out of the bathroom it was supposed to be time to go. As Brian began to try and put Millie back in her cage she took a pathetic flight into the kitchen, which was about 5 feet from the table where he was sitting with her. Of course, we had to get her! Birds don't run free while pet owners are away at church! So we carefully, slowly, sweetly tried to lull her back to one of us so we could put her in her cage. Well, as you can imagine, she wanted no part of it. She'd let one of us pick her up only to use us as her next launching point for a pathetic flight to no where! At last, she flew and landed on the stove(thankfully, we weren't cooking!), and with cupboards above her and just a small space to the wall we figured we should be able to easily trap her. Ah-ha! We had her!!

Just as Brian thought he had her contained she Flitted, and flew, whack! Bang! into the bottom of the cupboard above and all of a sudden zing!! She took off!! Only to fly behind the refrigerator. sigh. (In case you've forgotten, we were supposed to be heading out the door NOT chasing a stupid bird around the kitchen!) Unfortunately, birds don't belong behind refrigerators, so we had to try and get her out of there. Being the smart bird that she was, she wasn't fearful and still in this new and strange place that she'd landed, she was back behind there going completely berserk! I just knew she was going to kill herself! Get caught in the coils, smoking feathers, dead bird, ew! Finally, after dragging the fridge out of a very tight space were were able to get the bird out and back into her cage. Needless to say, we were late to church. What a crazy reason we had to tell folks, "We were late because our bird got stuck behind the refrigerator!" I bet that's not an excuse that many preachers hear!

And in case you're wondering, we don't have a bird for a pet anymore and probably never will. The rest of our wonderful days as bird owners will come next in

Once Upon A Time - A Story From The Past #2.