La Alaskeña

One of those sorts of days, the kind where you sit around and feel sorry for yourself and everybody else, the kind where you don’t change out of your pajamas, the kind where you are reading Endgame, a play which has two main characters living in trash cans, and you feel like you get it, like you and Beckett and Camus really know what’s going on in the world, which is to say, a whole lot of nothing.

This existential melodrama stems from the fact that our parakeet died yesterday.

He was our first real pet. Before him we just had shortlived goldfish. My little sister got him for her birthday while I was down at college. She was so excited. She’d wanted a pet for the longest time. Tori (which means ‘bird’ in Japanese) became Lara’s little buddy. He was played with, petted and cajoled. I thought that a parakeet sounded like a dumb pet until I came home on Christmas break and got to know the little fellow, at which point I realized that parakeets are totally awesome pets.

Remember when you were little and playing in the park, and you wanted to catch a bird but you were never quick enough? Remember watching Sleeping Beauty and wishing that birds would come land on you like that? Having a parakeet sort of fulfills all those childhood fantasies. For instance, I used to hold Tori on my finger while singing “A Spoonful of Sugar” from Mary Poppins. Tori never chirped back like the animatronic robin in the movie, but he was a bird, and instead of flying around, he sat on my shoulder and tried to eat my hair. That never ceased to amaze me.

He was smart. He knew how to talk. He’d say his name. He’d look in the mirror and say, “Pretty bird!” He said “Andrea” and “Petunia”, which was really funny to me, that he knew the name of the dog. When Lara kissed him he would make a little kissy chirp. He chattered away while the television was on, but if you turned it off, he’d stop right away, like we’d pushed the mute button. He perched on my dad’s glasses. He liked to try and eat the mascara off my eyelashes. When I was lonely, he’d sit on my shoulder and give my ear loving little nips.

He was a sweet little bird, but he got tumors and had to be put to sleep. And that makes me really sad.

I’m sad because I’ll miss him. I’m sad because my sister lost her little buddy. Mostly I’m sad because I don’t like being reminded of mortality. Not avian mortality, not canine or feline mortality, and definitely not human mortality.

I’m sad because when this sort of thing happens, it makes me think about Big Questions that I don’t know the answer to, like what happens when we die. I prefer to think about what I’d like for dessert, or who looked best at the Oscars. But once you get started thinking about the Big Questions, it’s hard to stop, and pretty soon “I miss my bird” turns into “WHAT IS THE MEANING OF LIFE?!”

And I can think about that all day, or indeed, for a lifetime, and not come up with a single answer. In fact, perhaps the meaning of life is just to try and ignore those Big Questions as much as possible, to just keep plugging away and living, rather than philosophizing over what it all means, or if it has meaning at all. I prefer to believe that there is some sort of meaning, that things happen for a reason. What is the meaning, the reason? Hell if I know.  

But I do know that our lives were happier because of Tori and I’d like to think that Tori was better off because of us. I guess that’s all we can ask for, in our interactions with our pets or our fellow humans. So go hug everyone and every animal you love, and if you’ll excuse me, I need to go watch Oprah and eat about a gallon of ice cream.