One day my husband Nik arrived home carrying a green parrot in a small cage, and the poor thing looked terrified! I felt rather sorry for this new addition to the household; I would be unhappy too if I had been yanked from a rainforest and stuffed into such a small cage, so the first item on the parrot agenda was a call to Mr. Ferris on the mainland. Mr. Ferris had made wrought iron porch railings and gates for us, and we correctly assumed that he could make a proper cage for the parrot.
We named the parrot Sinbad and, while he looked more relaxed in a larger cage, he was never what I would call a happy bird. He squawked incessantly, but any attempts to teach him to talk were in vain. I had heard other green parrots talk a blue streak, but my feathered pet stubbornly refused to say “hello” or “thank-you”. He may have TRIED to say “thank-you”, but as it sounded suspiciously like “f…k you” I had my doubts!
I learned what Sinbad liked to eat by trial and error. He seemed to love guava fruit and pride of Barbados pods more than anything else, but any fruit was fine. He made an awful mess; between the fruit-eating and pooping the cage had to be cleaned often, a rather nasty chore to say the least, and one I delegated to others whenever possible. Sinbad was a noisy slob but I grew to love him anyway, and was sad when he suddenly died. One day he simply stretched out his wings and passed away, and the house fell eerily quiet.
Not long afterwards Nik brought another parrot home, and I called him Sinbad too. Sinbad 2 was a friendlier fellow, just as messy and noisy as his predecessor but without the attitude, and I wondered if THIS parrot would learn how to talk. I had a bit of success in that department; after a lot of prompting, Sinbad would say “Pretty Boy” and “Hello” and, unlike the first Sinbad, I never once heard him say “f…k you”!
Sinbad 2 disappeared while I was away on vacation, and I have never discovered what really happened to him. Did he escape from his cage? Had he died? Or is he one of the three parrots we hear flying past our house each day? Whenever I see those three parrots and listen to their squawking it makes me happy; they had been caged at one point and are now free to spread their wings and fly, eat fruit from a tree and perhaps even mate.
I hear the parrots every day, and sometimes my imagination allows me to make out the words, “Pretty boy! Pretty boy!” as they fly past my house…..
