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Ty was indoctrinated into Warner Bros cartoons at an early age, Foghorn Leghorn especially. (With Henery the Hawk being a special fave.) I will always laugh every time I hear Ty sputter, “I’m a chicken hawk and you’re a chicken”. (Kids these days, don’t know how to tie down their own punkins.)

But Warner Brothers wasn’t the be all end all…

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Long before Animaniacs, Ty understood the value of “boo,” so we especially appreciated Chicken Boo. Yes, Ty can whistle “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.”

After all, everyone has got a fistful of feathers around here….

Sing along! “You wear a disguise to look like human guys, but you’re a man, you’re a chicken boo!” (not that I’m admitting Ty and I know the words to the theme song…) I told you that guy was a chicken!

©2010 Heckled By Parrots. All Rights Reserved.

You Shall Not Pass!

Much to the dismay of my animals, I returned from a long trip out-of-state to spend the entire weekend in front of my computer. In my last two homes my office was hidden away, safe from the diversion of parrots and dogs and falcons. I’m not convinced if the Ghetto House has the perfect layout or the worst possible scenario, but here, I am accessible to all animals. Ty peeks in on me, the falcons are twenty feet from the office window and the dog makes the rounds. I am not lacking in distraction if the furred and feathered members of the house choose to make a ruckus. And Ty was reigning ruler of the ruckus on Sunday.

Ripping paper, throwing food, destroying toys, narrating… and somehow I managed to tune him out. Perhaps it had something to do with the head cold I’m fighting, and my diminished hearing, but mostly I was able to resist the temptation to turn and reward his labors with a glare. It wasn’t until late in the afternoon, all efforts thwarted that Ty turned to amusing himself and finally got my full attention.

When Ty was just a youngster he used to play puppet with his foot. Holding a closed foot in front of his face, he would babble to it in his burgeoning Pigeon English. Then he would shake his foot as if it were holding the other side of the conversation and babble some more. As the back and forth became more heated, the offending foot would inevitably strike him in the beak and the conversation would turn into a full-blown argument complete with shrieking and what sounded like African grey profanity. It terrified me the first few times, until I realized he was only playing.

On Sunday, Ty’s frenemy was the bell hanging from his cage. Talking and ringing, I ignored what was apparently a conversation between Ty and his imaginary counterpart until their discussion got out of control. It seemed the cheeky bell struck my poor Ty and the damaged parrot screamed as if he had been thrown across the room. I jumped from my chair to rush to his defense only to find Ty perfectly happy and blinking at me, confused by my concern. It was only a game.

I don’t know if parrots need adversaries or if Ty’s play is natural, practice based on the need to be able to defend one’s territory. I simply don’t have any science to back up a hypothesis on Ty’s lifelong imaginary frenemies. He did get me thinking though, how natural it is for humans to need challenges, situations and sometimes even people to focus their aggression and anger toward.

A life with no hurtles is a boring life indeed. In these difficult times, it is easy to wish for smooth roads. Yet, my anger toward the people who robbed me twice in my old home was a catalyst for better things, moving to a better neighborhood and a happier place. People I have admired and who have snubbed me in some way, drive me to push my shoulders back and imagine ways to show them up. Even something as simple as a bout of bad luck can get my dander up. “Yeah, well just watch me have a better day.”

These people and things don’t care if I despise them; they don’t even know I exist. So what’s the harm? Maybe we should treasure our imaginary frenemies. Sometimes they are just important and helpful as our real friends.  I suspect Ty has a fuller more creative life because he loves his.

©2010 Heckled By Parrots. All Rights Reserved.

Ty Smile

Most nights lately, I dream that I have to move again. I wrestle with my finances and how to pay for a deposit and moving expenses in my sleep. I wonder where I will fly the falcons and if I am allowed to have a dog where I’m going. And then I wonder why the hell I have to move again anyway. The dreams don’t offer any answers to this question, just the crushing feeling of having to leave and the certainly that it was a bad decision I committed to and cannot undo.

I wake at 3:30am when the newspaper hits my front door like clockwork. The Brittany stirs just enough so that I can feel him at my feet. I listen for the rustle of feathers and the parrots readjusting to go back to sleep. All of this reassures me. I’m home. Everyone is here. I didn’t do anything stupid and I don’t have to leave. Then I fall back asleep with the animals and the dreams start up again.

I’ve only lived in the 1910 ghetto house for two months, but a part of me is fretting over the next move already. The thing is I only have these dreams when I really want to stay somewhere. I only have these dreams when I’m starting to feel like everything is just fine and therefore I could screw it up at any minute. I only have these dreams because the animals make me responsible for something other than myself and Ty is their voice.

It has been years since I’ve seen Ty this animated and vocal. Not that he isn’t always these things, but he’s been on overdrive since we moved. The ghetto house is full of windows and activity. (Technically, I live in “the ghetto” but the only thing ghetto about my street really is its richness of character and a few extra police cars.) There are people walking by, squirrels bounding through the trees, birds flickering past the view and feral cats to keep out of the yard. The dog is on constant patrol and Ty comments on his activities. “Come here, Booth,” he says. “You’re a good dog.”

Booth on Patrol

Even better, his cage is in the most opportune position ever to survey his domain. Unless I hide in the bathroom or my bedroom, there is no escaping his constant critique. (And even from there I can hear him and he knows it.) He goads me when I work at my desk, calls out requests when surveying my cooking preparations and chimes in with my choice of music and television when I’m in the living room. Ty is one exuberant and busy bird these days. And although he is driving me nuts, I love that I hear in Ty’s voice how well my animals are living. And there’s a certain pressure to keep them that way.

I have never meant for animals to replace people or family-building in my life. Honestly, my long swathes of solitude and nearly perpetual single status would have been characteristic of my life whether or not it was peppered with birds and dogs. It’s simply who I am. What they have done however, I hope, is keep me from being entirely hopelessly self-centered. Sure, I pay my bills, work hard at my jobs and am generally dependable, but being responsible for the well-being and dare I say, joy, of others is a different kind of responsibility all together.

And yes, “joy” is a construct and something I cannot control, but Ty has taught me to tally up the behaviors that I believe equate to joy and figure out my role in encouraging them. It is after all, hard to ignore even unintentional advice when it is so insistent and in your own voice. Ty is not a people replacement, but he is surely a fine educator in how to take pleasure in someone else’s pleasure.

Lately it’s pretty joyful around here and mostly I don’t let the dreams get to me. I know they are a part of me that I should be grateful for, the part of me that worries about the living beings I love and am responsible for and that I only worry because life has such moments of bliss right now. The truth is, I guess, that being heckled by parrots makes me happy. (But please, no one don’t tell Ty that.)

©2010 Heckled By Parrots. All Rights Reserved.

When I was in High School I would sit in my room for hours playing guitar and singing. With no sisters or brothers, computer or personal phone line, I was desperate for company. A part of me must have thought if you sang the world was listening.

I don’t know how my grandparents stood it, quite frankly, me scratching away at the strings, mangling chord progressions over and over while I wrenched songs out of my drama and hormones. I imagine at their advanced age it was the better alternative to trying to speak with a teenager.

I played and wrote songs for years, even as an adult. Ty, six weeks-old, barely feathered, quickly knew my singing voice as well as he knew my conversation. He heard me compose a maybe-I-should-break-up-with-you song for my live-in boyfriend. (And then heard me deny that those were my intentions when said boyfriend heard me sing it.) Ty witnessed the break-up too, of course.

Ty then listened when I wrote my I’m-really-kind-of-sad-but-I’m-sure-I’ll-get-over-it song. Our move to Florida involved an I’m-so-homesick song and then an oh-my-God-isn’t-this-place-amazing song. There was of course, a how-dare-you-break-my-heart-you-bastard song somewhere in there as well. I wonder if my songs punctuated time for Ty like his chosen phrases punctuated mine. He did after all, sing.

Ty mostly made up his own words, or rather his own language and often his own melody, but he always sang along. And we kept singing the old songs while I wrote new ones until right around my 30^th birthday when I stopped.

I don’t know why I stopped, honestly. There wasn’t an incident or a decision I made. I just stopped. Maybe I didn’t need it or maybe I let things get in the way. All the same, I have a book of lyrics and two guitars that have moved with Ty and me everywhere we’ve gone. And the other night I pulled the guitar out of the closet.

I’m six months out from a big birthday and lately my past feels like it’s folding into my future. It doesn’t help that the novel I’m writing is tackling some of my deepest fears about who I was, am, will be. I guess I was wanting to find some of the old places and raw feelings in the songs. Or more likely, I was just feeling lonely like that teenager I was, desperate to tell someone exactly how she felt. I wondered if a guitar and a song could still feel like pulling the world to my feet to listen.

I tuned the guitar. I found a few tentative chords. I wracked my brain to remember a song and I sang. It was frustrating. My voice is rusty, my fingers lacking calluses and it hurt to play. It didn’t feel like having a conversation with the world at all. And when I stumbled halfway through, forgetting the lyrics, I halted with a choice curse word. Then I slapped my hand on my mouth, hoping Ty, mimic of all things profane, didn’t hear.

Ty didn’t hear.

Ty was too busy singing. And singing. And singing. And it was bad. Worse than bad, it was horrible. It made me sound good. And it was also deliciously wonderful, especially when we both began to laugh.

I didn’t need the world to listen. I had Ty. I had Ty to remind me as always, that there are things in your life that you can dust off, embrace and they will still make you happy. That you should be happy. And that we should sing.

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Catch up on Tuesdays with Ty

©2010 Heckled By Parrots. All Rights Reserved.

Are You Paying Attention??

Life is distracting. It always has been. A winged silhouette above the freeway, a flash of color crossing the office window, the smell of something delightful cooking at a neighbor’s house will cause me to veer and forget what I was doing. Who could blame me? My distraction has made me a witness to things that have made my life bigger. Distraction is the only true magic. Life is so full of things which make veering worth the swerve. However, we’ve made distraction a god…

I can focus when necessary. Or at least, I used to be able to focus, but that was before the interwebs cobwebbed my brain and gave me a thousand strands to follow to dead ends. I choose to forget that it hasn’t always been this way.

Ty, however, has an endless memory and zero tolerance for human idiocy. There are certain things in life that deserve and should demand your full attention, such as cleaning parrot cages. You’d think after fifteen years I would be good at that.

This is what happens. I start by opening cage doors and sipping some coffee, then lavishing attention on one feathered head and then the next. It’s a lovely way to start the morning, with avian reinforcement, but from there my attention wavers. I strip out newspaper, pull out bowls and then more often than not these days, wander.

You see after the cuddling I’m already thinking about raising money for conservation, writing assignments for the weekend, the things I’m meaning to write for myself and then the good and mindless things that might be in my inbox. I veer for the computer. Oh shiny! A comment on the blog, my name in a Google alert, a request for some interesting tidbit of information… Parrot cages? What parrot cages? This has almost become the ritual…until last week.

“Where are you?” Ty asked. “Where are you? Where are you? Where are you? Where are you?” OKAY. I popped in the room. This question means that a parrot is on the loose, the dog is missing, something I need to tend to is happening. So I came back to the half-cleaned cages and empty bowls.

“LoooookIIII,” Ty said. I looked around. Loki was on her cage and Ty was looking at me. I pointed at my chest. Me

“What are you trying to say?” I asked him, but I knew. The amazing thing about parrots is that they label incidents not just things. It’s not that they nail language, but that there is some abstract in the way they label. The 6 year-old dog bouncing off the walls will be called puppy, because it’s puppy behavior. It’s creepy sometimes, especially when it sounds like you’re being called an impossible irritating parrot who always wanders off to get into things yourself.

“Fine.” I said and finished putting in fresh paper, bringing veggies and almonds and pretending not to be schooled, but I had been schooled. I’m better than that. We all are. There are things that deserve my full attention until they are finished, like my morning care-taking and the time I spend with my friends. What about you? Yes, you with the Crackberry or the iCrack in your hand while I’m telling you my best story. What would Ty say?

Maybe we all should be a little less distracted or at least know what is truly worth the distraction.

©2010 Heckled By Parrots. All Rights Reserved.

2010-fatelaat_MG_0475 - Version 2 by Hen3k_Hen3K

Ty spent three days at the bottom of his cage, ripping every bit of available newspaper into tiny strips.

When there was nothing left to shred, he launched into the African grey parrot version of a full-blown tantrum, beak clamped on the cage corner and feet kicking as if to dig a hole to Africa –and throw the mud of his efforts to the sky.

My house was littered with endless newspaper and angst.

I have seen Ty do this many times over the years, but not for so long and with such insistence. I tried talking to him, but he only fluffed and struck at me, his best Garbo imitation an unspoken, “I want to be alone…”

I put new toys in the cage. I brought almonds. I sang to him. I played music with more lyrical singers. I opened the door to the cage. I fretted and tried to make things better, but I didn’t know what was wrong. What could I say? What could I do? Ty shredded and kicked and muttered and refused to abandon his mission.

On the third day of this, I finally threw up my hands and let him rage. Late in the afternoon, I cracked a bottle of Corona and sat on the floor, watching from a distance, thinking about my own tantrums. When I was a child and the anger I didn’t understand built into a pressure that made me shake, I would destroy the things that were most precious to me, my books. Sitting in the middle of my room, I would tear out the pages of a book one at a time, the feel and the sound of shredding paper and demolishing things dear– a balm that even now I don’t understand. In my twenties, shredding books no longer satisfied the storms of anger. I would sit on the counter, sliding wine glasses from the cabinet one by one and hurtling them against the wall to hear them crack, shatter and rain onto the linoleum, an improvisation of bitter notes.

Surely a parrot’s tantrum doesn’t have the complexity of a human melt-down, but even so, I found myself admiring the complete abandon to which he gave himself to his fit. I know well how it is to feel something too  much and how no one can make it better but yourself. I learned how to funnel these feelings onto a page, into a song, create things rather than destroy them. Watching Ty though, I starting thinking that the occasional harmless tantrum is a deserved indulgence, that sometimes you simply don’t know why you are railing against the world, but you must. I suppose sometimes even animals just feel too big for their skin.

I was just really glad Ty didn’t have access to the wine glasses.

The thing is that there is no knowing what another person or animal is feeling. I can read behavior, but I can’t read minds. I also can’t shape feelings like behavior. What you feel is deserved and your own and it is no one’s place or job to fix it. I forget this sometimes; forget that we should forgive feelings instead of fix them. So I let Ty wind down his tantrum, stopped trying to get into his head and just admired his destruction.

If Oscar Wilde had kept an African grey parrot he surely would have said, “We are all at the bottom of the cage, but some of us are kicking toward the sky.” Keep kicking, my friends…I won’t tell you to stop.

Catch up on Tuesdays with Ty

©2010 Heckled By Parrots. All Rights Reserved.

Shattered by Lisa Basil

I woke up the other morning without a voice, which apparently isn’t a problem in my house.

“Good morning,” Ty said as I entered the room and when I gave him a dirty look, he sighed and yawned. The coffee was already brewing and was my first stop. I poured myself a cup, lifted it for a sip and leaned against the counter. “Mmmn. Coffee!” Ty said and I nodded.

We were all just waking up, but Loki, my Senegal parrot was being a little too exuberant about it. Ty executed a perfect Senegal-greeting-the-dawn call only at triple the volume Loki can manage and then he said, “Loki, hush.”

I shook my head and got started cleaning cages. I accidentally brushed Ty with the fresh newspaper I was laying down in his cage. “Oh, sorry,” he said and then nipped at me, missing. I glared at him. “Why are you so grumpy?” he mumbled. “Grumposaur,” he added more clearly and I stuck my tongue at him.

As I’m prone to do I wandered off for a moment, my task half done and the birds on the loose. I was distracted by The Today Show and how nicely those Hanson boys have grown up. I was just thinking about how fortunate I was that Ty never learned that annoying MMMBop song, when the grey taskmaster reminded me I had work to do.

“Loki, where are you?,” Ty called. I peeked around the corner. Loki was no where in sight. That’s never good. I found her in the kitchen sorting through the veggies I had laid out on the counter for parrot breakfast. “Lokiiiiii!” Ty said with more exasperation than I have ever used.

I put Loki back on her cage and returned to organizing parrot food. Something nudged my leg and I looked down into an expectant Brittany face. “What?” Ty asked, irritated. Booth raised an eyebrow at me. Right. Feed the dog next. I gathered up my bowls, balancing breakfast and trying to get past Booth, who wanted to make certain he really was next. I tripped over him. “You’re killing me, dog,” Ty said.

“Here you go,” he said as I slipped his bowl into place. He looked into it suspiciously, “Do you want an almond?” he asked. I pointed at his bowl. He inspected it more closely and found the nut under a piece of broccoli.

My cell phone rang and I grabbed it to see who was calling. “This is Rebecca,” Ty said in between bites of almond. I didn’t recognize the number, so I put down the phone. “Right. Right. Oh my god! Okay, alright, bye,” Ty said. I held the phone out to him and glared. He went back to eating his almond.

I fed the remaining animals, showered, dressed and passed Ty’s cage ready to go to work. He clunked like my coffee cup being set on the counter, that is, if my coffee cup was the size of a barrel. Then he did a perfect imitation of what must have been a six foot length of zipper. I had no zipping bag or cup in my hands. Now you’re just making thing up, I thought.

“See you later, alligator,” he said when I opened the door so I waved at him. As I locked it behind me I heard him calling, “After while, crocodile!” and thought about how grateful I was that he didn’t work with me too.

Catch up on Tuesdays with Ty

©2010 Heckled By Parrots. All Rights Reserved.

Gone by Zixii on Flickr

I didn’t used to hate summer.

When I was a child I adored the hot months. There was nothing I loved more than the ocean bathed in mid-afternoon heat. Of course, with my skin that meant –burn, blister and peel.

My grandmother chased after me constantly with sunscreen and vitamin E, but I still relished sloughing off my winter skin in the summer. It seemed like a metaphor for the way every summer was a fresh start, how by the school year you would not only look different, but could be different.

As an adult, summer is lost on me.

New birds, days afield and falconry season start in September, a month that seems far away while the summer beats on you, an unrelenting lull. And to make things worse, it’s the molt. Daily my carpet and the mews are awash in down feathers, dust and annoyance. The parrots and the falcons are itchy, irritable and it feels as though we are all of us scratching at the surface of things about to transform, but not changing fast enough.

Over these months, the birds swap out most all of their feathers, emerging newly dressed for the winter. It is not so much how this amazing physiological feat happens as that it can. We humans do it too, slough off skin, shed hair, scab over wounds and find fresh skin beneath. It just is not nearly as dramatic as a molt and this makes it easy to forget how important it is to let go, shed it all and find what’s fresh underneath.

My skin has not burned and peeled since I was a child, but I know that I molted when I wrote Lift. The hardest work of the memoir was sloughing off more than I believed I could let go of, letting the feathers spiral to floor one by one. I’m not the woman in Lift, nor am I the woman who wrote Lift anymore. I’ve had several molts since then and I know I’m better, happier for it, but I still resist letting the feathers fall.

I gathered up an over-preened and tattered primary from Ty today, two broken deck feathers from my falcon, Sister. Finding these feathers gave me a sense of relief. Next year, maybe I can figure out why Ty over-preens those two feathers, make sure Sister doesn’t break her tail. We get to start over, do this better. It’s just, I guess, that the molt is so damn long, that releasing mistakes and starting over takes more time than I feel is reasonable.

I need to let that go. We all do. The feathers grow back — they grow back perfectly when nurtured in the quiet months of summer. It’s true, even the birds don’t molt gracefully– but they do it. And I wonder why we all don’t slough off the excess, the tattered pieces and broken things we wear and allow ourselves to be new. Or perhaps I do know, but that’s no reason not to try to follow Ty’s example.

Now if I could just get someone to do the vacuuming for me…

Catch up on Tuesdays with Ty

©2010 Heckled By Parrots. All Rights Reserved.

Fluffy Ty

I did the math today and in his fifteen years Ty has moved house more than a dozen times, one more than a dozen, in fact. This is lucky number 13.

We made the first move from a condo in Riverside when Ty was only two and had just started to label his world. This was after a stalker shattered a youthful belief in my immortality and forced me with my head low, back to my father. I nursed my wounds, while Ty judged my shoes and wondered over my grumpiness until I found my future.

Our next move took four days of driving and taught me that Ty can be very demanding about bedtimes on the road. His “good nights” got so insistent I pulled into a hotel early one night just to get him to shut up. So we landed in Florida to start over. We lived on the ranch where I was training birds. We stayed in a trailer affectionately dubbed “The Velvet Elvis” until I found an apartment with a view of a lake and an eagle’s nest. Ty learned to cackle like a bald eagle and mimic grackles.

Then we relocated to Ohio for a summer, where I managed a brand new bird show at the Toledo Zoo. There living in the office, Ty learned to do an old school fax machine and a phone ring so pitch perfect, that he pissed off my boss who came running every time. From there we went to the Texas State Fair in Dallas, Ty mumbling under my plane seat the whole way.

And when I got sick and scared and lonely for family, we drove back to California so I could lick my wounds again. Ty said, “Bye! See you later!” when we crossed the California border and we barely made it past the perplexed border guard.

After that we spent six months house sitting in the rural desert mountains, where Ty learned to call “Stump” the dog and wonder “where ARE you,” after the tortoises in my care. Then we landed in the La Quinta apartment where Anakin changed my world view and Ty narrated my early mornings. I bought a house and there Ty learned to mimic the sound of fledging red-tailed hawks and howl like the neighborhood dogs against the fire truck sirens and he laughed, a lot.

Two years ago we moved for a dream job. I still have the job, but hated the house so we moved again. I don’t know if Ty hated it too or succumbed to my unhappiness, but it was a quiet year and half. It was the only place that even Ty couldn’t make home. So I wisely moved us.

Ty is in fine form again in this house where he can survey the kitchen, living room and office from his cage. There’s no escaping his commentary now. My favorite, his newest phrase, a plaintive, “You’re killing me, dog.” I didn’t even realize that I said that, but I have to laugh.

Surely, this place will be temporary too, but I’m hoping for a few less transitory years. Not that Ty seems to mind. He has brought a bit of every place we’ve ever lived along for the ride, the good things, really. Ty seems to know that home sounds like the wild outside, the routines that don’t change and the laughter you bring with you. And I guess I don’t mind either. I’ll move thirteen times more as long as Ty can come with me.

Catch up on Tuesdays with Ty

©2010 Heckled By Parrots. All Rights Reserved.

Dew Drop Spider Web By Jeff Smallwood on Flickr

Ty has spent two weeks watching me pack with disinterest. We are moving again, sooner than usual, but not a surprise.

As the house slowly converts into an obstacle course, he has been more interested in me than the changing landscape. He watches me distract myself with things forgotten, holding them up to light or up against my memories and imagination and he catches me, just before I open my mouth.

“Huh,” Ty says with a note of intrigue and surprise. A syllable of “isn’t that interesting. I wonder if it would, if I could, if there were…I wonder.” It’s as if he were looking over my shoulder, reading my thoughts and lost in a reverie himself. It was startling the first time he did it. I thought it was cute the next few times. Soon it was infuriating. I don’t walk around constantly startled and amazed by mundane moments and ordinary objects like a seven year-old. Or do I?

“Huh.”

Decades of trying to think like a bird, to finesse things with wings into staying or at least coming back have become a life of many miniature and immediate moments. You learn to spot a spider web that wasn’t in the room when you closed your eyes the night before, then to stare into something more and then something less so you can move on. You learn to notice the rare color of a feather where the gray meets the blue just beneath a wing. You learn pitch and pace and examination. I think you learn to live when you see what birds see. So I keep looking.

There is more to discover than yourself when you move. As I cleared the walls of my soon to be vacated home, I noticed a shock of cracks scattering from a ceiling corner. I stood on a chair to look closer and wondered if they were from Loma Prieta, or a lamp hurled across the room by an angry lover. I imagined a contractor shrugging and thinking, good enough. I traced my fingers across the lines and Ty said, “Wow.” I smiled and nodded.

I revel in distraction. I’m lucky to have Ty to remind me that life is curious and that it’s better that way. Now if only I could teach him to pack…

©2010 Heckled By Parrots. All Rights Reserved.