Fuss and feathers

I did it to them.  They’re alright now, but I wanted to rock their boat just to see how they’d adjust.

That is, Sky and Sister Sarah.  In our pet menagerie, we have two birds – finches.  If you know your Broadway musicals, you know the names from “Guys and Dolls.”  

Sky the bird (on the left in the photo) is much like the character – Brando-esque, full of himself, a con’s con.  If he had a cigar, he’d smoke it.

Sarah plays her role well, too.  She’s the strong female … less vocal and a bit repressed, but hardly yielding to Sky’s bravado.

My experiment with the birds yesterday was about “change.” Cindy and I talk a lot about change and wanting to make sure we stay as nimble of habit and goals as possible as we age.  The odds are against you – routine is comfortable, and I’m convinced that your brain grows less pliant as the years bump along, like an overripe melon that dries up and eventually caves in on itself.

The symptoms are there already: Last night we took the dogs for a walk. I insisted we take a right at the crosswalk like we always do; Cindy’s instinct was to go straight ahead.  I nudged her to the right; straight ahead seemed just, uh, wrong.  Only later did I ask myself why.  In fact, it was opportunity lost: We could have peeked in the window of somebody new. 

And so to the birds.  They live in a wire cage measuring about 3-foot square and tall.
 

They do love to talk.  We think they mainly talk to each other, but more and more I think they just like to hear their own voices … like those puffed-up, left-right talking heads on Fox or MSNBC who yak more than listen. 

We started the birds out in what we call the “TV room,” where we hang out a lot.  But their gab was incessant – made worse by TV’s chatter.  And invariably their chirps and tweets would shatter a touching moment on the small screen.

So we moved them back to the sunroom, just outside our bedroom.  It’s been a nice compromise.  They begin their discourse at dawn, but because our door is closed, it’s muted. So we get all the benefits of a rooster without the raw-edged “doodle-do.”

Change does not come easily for these birds.  Perhaps it’s because their environment is so small, so anything different within it causes consternation. 

Cindy recalls the day when their round, straw house, normally suspended from the cage’s top, broke and tumbled to the bottom. Perched above, Sky and Sarah stared rapidly at each other, then down, then at each other, then down, chattering with each gawk and gape … clearly, their world was now upside down.

So my trick was to deliberately cause such a change but in a more subtle way.  And to observe how they’d cope.

Attached to the cage’s front, on either side of the front door, sits a food tray and a water tray. Normally, the food is on the left, the water on the right. It has been that way every day for the last four years.  The birds are insatiable, so they visit the food constantly, the water only occasionally. They could land on that food perch with their eyes closed if they had to.

When I change food and water, I pull the trays out while the birds gather on their perch, chattering about what’s coming.  Then I pop in the replenished trays and leave.  They prefer I not stick around when they size up the new grub.

Per usual, I put in the fresh trays.  But this time I switched them … the food now on the right; water now on the left.  Then I walked quietly away but just far enough to still watch.

Sarah moved first … she usually does … fluttering immediately to the left tray.  Sky hung back, sensing something amiss.

Sarah, seeing water instead of seed, recoiled.  Like a child expecting ice cream and getting turnips.

She dashed to the bottom of the cage; Sky joined her.  And they looked up, then at each other, then up again.

Only this time, they were speechless.

Their heads would swivel -- right tray, left tray, right, left -- unsure of their next move. You could see it in their silence: Four years of dependability were now gone; their tiny brains were stretching to conceive this new world. 

Practically speaking, given the cage’s location, they would now have to fly north to get food, fly south for water.

It was like asking a duck to winter in the Yukon.

I’d never heard such quiet from these two.  Clearly, they were out of sorts, struck dumb.

Then Sarah got a grip. She looked right-left again, but this time it seemed less in panic and more in calm deliberation.  I think the new reality had dawned.  And she was hungry.

Up she went, to the north.  She landed. Usually she would snatch seeds immediately. But if a bird can sniff, she did it then. It seemed okay to her: The brightly colored seeds rested in front like usual, the tray’s perch felt the same.  Sure, the context was out of kilter; the views through the cage seemed different … like moving the dinner table to the rumpus room.

But she was hungry. 

So she ate.

Useless, Sky remained below, skeptical, maybe waiting to see if Sarah would keel over.

Finally, his thick head catching up to his stomach, he flew next to her, shoving her a bit to the side. She ignored him, continuing to eat.

This morning when I awoke, all was normal.  The birds, snapped awake by the sun, had been chitchatting for a couple of hours … yesterday’s turbulence seemed hardly a memory.

My guess, though, is that Sarah’s brain waves are a little less taut than before.  And that if I flopped the trays again, she’d adjust more quickly this time. Sky probably would dither, although I hope for not as long. And eventually, if I did it every day, there’d be no hesitation at all.

And that’s the lesson.  A simple one that should be obvious but it seems less so with time: What seems inconceivable or impossible -- a change in situation, a goal, a wish -- shouldn’t be fought or ignored.  Instead, accept it, or better yet, go find it.  Then wrap your arms around it and squeeze like your life depends on it.

I kind of think it does. 

Sarah knows.

Youth and the big bang theory

What is it about July 4^th that brings out the devil in us? A time to show independence, I guess. 

I’m reminded of three instances while growing up: When Dad said no, and I lit the fuse anyway; the smoke bomb in the neighbor’s basement; and the bottle rockets that friend Dave and I set off to land exactly above his neighbor’s dog house.

Oh, we were so evil then …

***

First, when Dad said no.

This is the most innocent of the three.  I’m guessing I was but 8 or 9 years old. As July 4^th approached, I and my neighbor friends had amassed loads of Black Cats, Atomic and Dixie Boy firecrackers. We also bought Peacock brand, but I remember they were kind of wimpy. Lots of duds.

Sure, we had “safe” fireworks, like snakes and sparklers.  But who does those and then boasts about it?

Firecrackers, though … oh, what power!  We put 'em under tin cans and sent the cans soaring. We did other things, of course, but I can’t say what for fear of inspiring others.

So on that holiday, we had family friends over for food and fun. The food was ready, so  Dad decreed “no more firecrackers.”

As everyone else sat down to eat barbecue outside, I dawdled in the backyard. I had a Black Cat all ready to go.  I have no idea why I did it.  Perhaps because I could.  But I lit it.

“Bang!!” A single shot, but stark because of the quiet around it.

“Doug!!!” Dad yelled.

“Uh oh,” I thought.

I ran down to where he was, between house and garage. Dad rarely got mad. But he clearly was angry. The only other time I saw him like this was when I had hurled a tennis ball through the back-bedroom window.

“I told you … no … more … firecrackers.” He said it quietly, forcefully, his face hard, his normal smile gone. 

Chastened, I lit no more that night.  Oh, a few snakes and sparklers.

But nothing to boast about.

***

A couple of years later, I was visiting my next-door neighbor, Mikey.  We hung out in his  basement, which was kind of cool … it was “finished,” which meant it had decent walls, was dry and well organized.  It had a television at one end, couches in the middle.  We used to gather there to watch spook movies like Frankenstein and the Mummy.

In the corner of the basement, though, in a small, separate room, sat the internal portion of the central air conditioning system.  Now, keep in mind that central air conditioning back then wasn’t necessarily common. We didn’t have it at our house; we’d eventually get a few window units, but nothing like the neighbors’ centralized installation.  It was a massive metal box with a big whirring fan that sat behind slatted doors.  You could pop the doors open to see what was inside.

Well, for some reason that day I came armed with a pocketful of round smoke bombs.  Smoke bombs then and now are pretty harmless.  Not a bomb at all, really, but a ball of sulfuric substance that releases innocent clouds of various colors.  They stink, of course, but that’s the fun of it.

I don’t know why I did it – perhaps because I could – but I lit one of them and tossed it in to the air conditioning unit’s little chamber.  And the smoke billowed forth.

Honestly, I didn’t know what to expect when I lit the fuse.  Sure, I assumed there’d be smoke in that room. But I think I also knew intuitively that the AC unit would send that smoke up throughout the whole house. That was the experiment – and the mischief.

Sure enough, I heard cries upstairs, and then Mikey's sister charged down the stairs, complaining that green smoke was coming through the vents in the rooms above … all the way to the second floor.

“Ah hah!” I thought … followed by “ooops.”

I decided to leave. I walked up the basement stairs to the outside and slinked back home.  I never heard from the neighbor’s parents about the incident.  Luckily they weren’t home.  And green smoke, after all, is eye-catching but temporary.  Poof, it’s gone.

But the act became legend in the neighborhood. If I may so boast.

***

Now this third act was the most diabolical.  By now I’m well in to junior high school, so the mischief gets a bit more sophisticated.

What I can’t recall was whether this was July 4^th or New Year’s Eve. I believe the latter, because I remember it was a dark night. Regardless, the bottle rockets were leftovers from a July 4^th stash.

My folks and I were at a friend’s house for holiday dinner.  Dave and I had been friends since grade school.  Not quite like peas in a pod, because he was smarter than me.  But close nonetheless.  One Halloween, we made matching Indian totem-pole costumes and wore them in our grade school’s Halloween parade. That’s how close we were.

Anyway, older now and unquestionably wiser, we decided to step outside while the parents enjoyed coffee after dinner.

“I’ve got some bottle rockets,” Dave said quietly.  And a metal pipe to shoot them from, he added.  So we were set.

Only, the target wasn’t straight up.  The neighbors across the street, to the east, had a rather large dog in the backyard. Dave wanted to see if we could arch the bottle rockets over the house, into the backyard.

Oh, a key point: These rockets soared then “BOOMED!” at the end of their short journey.

A marvelous invention.

So we prepared our first launch.  Dave, using his smarts, estimated distance, angle, wind speed.  The pipe in the ground now adjusted, he lit the fuse.

“FFffffffiiiiiitttttt!”

Off it went; trailed by sparks, it banked wide left of the house. 

“BOOM!!”

“Rrwooof!! Rrwoof!” The barking began … not barks of fear or cowardice, but slow barks directed at a nuisance.

We snickered.

Dave adjusted the pipe up and to the right a bit, then loaded another one.

“FFffffffiiiiiitttttt!”

Up it shot, a beautiful arch over the house, then behind it. 

“BOOM!!”

We could see the tight blast, white against the dark sky.

“RRRR-WOOOF!! RRRR-WOOOF!!”

No longer tentative, the dog was in a frenzy.  The barks weren’t just angry ... more a deep-throated scream of bloodlust. I imagined him on a rope that was overstretched, a rubber band ready to snap.

We laughed, now nervously.

So we readied a third and sent it soaring.  Perfectly targeted, it exploded as designed. 

The dog was apoplectic.  And dogs throughout the neighborhood were joining in … barks of sympathy or shared anger, I couldn’t tell. But many voices, and loud.

Suddenly, the neighbor’s front door crashed open.  The father charged out. We could see him because of his porch light; he could see us because of ours.

He looked straight at us, his face an angry red. Cursing loudly, he spun like a dervish, marched inside and slammed the door.

“Oh crap,” I thought.  Dave uttered something more vivid.

Within seconds, the telephone inside Dave’s house rang. 

We held our breaths, knew what was coming. The dogs’ chorus continued.

Dave’s front door jerked open; we looked at our shoes, like that would save us.

You can imagine what came next.  It did. Needless to say, we were disarmed.

In hindsight, I’m a bit ashamed of this act. So there’s no boasting here.  I love dogs, and I would be incensed if this was attempted on my two pups.

But youth is a time to test limits.

We did it, clearly because we could.