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I live with two birds. Ramses the African Grey is a free-range parrot. He thinks he's a dog. He follows Sissy around the house, perches on one leg at the edge of the dog bed, grooms Sissy's long white hair, shares kibble and milk bones under the kitchen table. Sissy 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 the crabapples off a gnarled tree. 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.
One 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 forgotten highway. Oh yeah, a real date.
I was moving my wallet to my good velvet purse when it happened. My youngest son 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 my boy 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 her resting at the top of an enormous Douglas fir across the street. She looked tiny, a smudge of yellow against the blue heat of the sky, beak pointed toward the ocean so far away. She flitted down, soared toward the sky again, landed on another tree even further away.
She's gone, I thought. She's heard the rumble feather call of the wild. She's gone.
I turned around, took my son in my arms, both of us crying, my mascara running from my cheeks to his head.
"It's Ok. It's Ok. It's Ok." I kept whispering nothing words over and over, wanted to calm him, 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 my boy 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 behind the horizon, singing to the tree, to all the birds of the world. My son took a deep breath and broke the circle.
"She'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. She's coming back. We have to believe it. She belongs to our flock, just
