birds | Writing As I Please

In the fall of 2005 my mom decided she wanted to get some parakeets, because she had a couple when she was a girl. We got two and then I decided I wanted one, about a month later. Around this time a new kitty had come into our life, Ebba. I was allowed to get my own parakeet, which I named “Prickly Pete”. This is based off of a “Seinfeld” episode where George Costanza is lying to his dead fiance’s parents about owning a property in the Hamptons. They know he’s lying but continues on with the lie because they hate him for, what they believe, killing their daughter (she died from licking the cheap, toxic envelopes that George bought). As they are driving to the Hamptons, George mentions he has two horses.

“What are their names?”

“Snoopy and Prickly Pete!”

So that’s where I got my parakeet’s name.

It wasn’t but a year later that the other parakeets died. So Pete was the only one left in the big cage we had for the three of them. I felt bad for him. Two of his cage-mates were dead and he was all alone. I went down in the basement and brought up one of the small cages we had bought earlier and decided to bring Pete up to my room where he would have the most company. He seemed to adjust well, especially with a mirror in there.

I didn’t expect him to last that long, as I wasn’t sure how long parakeets lasted after their friends died. Seven years later he is still with me, next to my computer.

He enjoys when I am there. I am his new buddy. But he doesn’t like me to be right close to the cage. I never trained him, so he’s rather skittish around people. But that’s not to say he doesn’t like me in the room. If I am somewhere else in the room, he screeches loudly as if to say, “Come back!”

I put toys in his cage for him but his favorite is his mirror. He preens and kisses his image quite frequently.

His new favorite thing is what I call his “Music Time”. In the morning and evenings I take the headphone jack out of my laptop and let him listen to my eclectic list of songs. Sometimes he bobs his head but mostly he just chirps. He normally stays at his mirror, where his food dish is but during Music Time he makes the small trek to the left side of the cage, nearer to my computer so he can listen better (seen in the photo above). He seems to respond the best to Hip Hop for some reason. I don’t have much Hip-Hop on my computer, but he does like Snoop Dog and Naughty By Nature. As I write this, he is chirping pleasantly to “Drop It Like It’s Hot”.

Back when I got Pete, we had three cats and two other birds. Now it’s just one cat and Pete. The cat comes and goes in the room but Pete is always there. He is my computer buddy.