A Helmet of Hair Makes a Mediocre Nest

Around the time I started 7th grade, my dad ruined my life by bringing home a sassy female parrot named Alfred. Alfred and I had only two things in common. We both kinda looked liked birds, and we both hated one another.

Alfred came to us from our cousin's house. My Aunt was intelligent enough to get rid of this demon bird who never shut up. My dad, who doesn't really like animals but is randomly a bird lover, was naieve enough to take her in. She came with some baggage, including a hatred for teenaged males and the ability to verbalize a range of annoying words and phrases. Having a talking pet that hates certain people causes some strange complications. First of all, whenever I entered a room, Alfred would go bonkers, swooping around trying to peck my eyes out.

Also, her voice sounded strikingly simillar to my mom's.

We missed approximately one half of our phone calls.

Once, the guy who rented the apartment over our garage knocked on our door to ask a question. Alfred called out, "Hello?" so the man assumed he should enter.

Other favorite phrases of Alfred's included saying "Oh my gosh" over and over in a gutteral voice (I think she got this from my teenaged girl-cousin), as well as repeating the name "Lou Bega" over and over again. Of all the musicians out there...

I think the worst part about Alfred was how much she and my dad loved each other. It was gross.

One morning before school, my mom was fixing her lunch for work. She had her makeup on and her usual perfect helmet of hair sprayed into place. My dad was reading the paper and had let Alfred out on her perch by the table. Then I rounded the corner to get some breakfast.

Alfred went homicidal. She launched herself into the air in full attack mode, only I ducked and she missed. She didn't know what to do next. There was no place to land, so she panicked and began swooping around, skwaking wildly. Finally, Alfred spotted the largest surface she could find, my mom's hair, and with her claws-out, went in for the landing. This didn't really suit her, as my mom kept moving, screaming and swatting at her, so she tried to take off again. The problem was that her talons were all tangled in my mom's hair. She kept skwaking and flapping about, trying to break free, while my mom screamed angrily at my dad for letting the bird out. The more Alfred wriggled, the more her talons became tangled. She just kept flopping up and down, yanking my mom's head around, while feathers rained down around the kitchen.

Finally, Alfred broke free, leaving my mom stunned, disheveled, and out of breath.

Alfred ended up going nuts a few years later and bit about half of my dad's hand off. The next day she had mysteriously "died of a disease," but I was suspicious.

Some questions are better left unanswered.

The Trouble With Pets Is That They're Always All Dead And Stuff

My family never had much luck with pets. When it came to cats, dogs, rabbits, turtles, parrots, and fish, their time was numbered. Try as we might, we couldn't seem to keep the suckers alive. We learned never to become too attached

When I was really little, we weren't allowed to have pets because of the "Incident of Jake In The Driveway," when my dad accidentally ran over my sister's cat with a suburban right in front of her. My mother felt that having her husband emotionally scar her daughter for life was enough to put a ban on owning animals.

Finally, my mom broke down and allowed us to get an orange kitten named Marmalade who had an affinity for crawling into the dishwasher. Surprisingly, this was not how Marmalade died. Instead, he went crazy (this was the medical term the vet used to explain his condition). He would run to the neighbor's house and urinate all over himself. This situation was exacerbated by the fact that the neighbor's adult live-in daughter was also crazy. She would dress in 80's exercise clothes, put sunscreen all over her lips, and dance by herself on their back deck, which was visible from our backyard.

One day I opened the door to this:

And then I did this:

And then my mom did this:

Then we got Jack, the Old English Sheepdog, who also met and untimely death. To learn more about how he died, and about how my mother gently broke the news of his passing, go here: http://jordiepaints.blogspot.com/2010/06/cake.html

Next, we got Bunnicula, a white rabbit with red vampire eyes. Bunnicula lived in a hutch outside. At that time, we lived on the intercoastal waterway. One morning we stepped outside to find a little girl from the neighborhood scooping up the rabbit pellets beneath the cage with her bare hands and tossing them into the water. She thought we kept fish food under the rabbit's cage, so my mom had to go out and set her straight. She ran home crying (understandably).

One day I went out to feed Bunnicula only to find that raccoons had pried open his cage, dragged him out on the lawn, and then proceeded to tear him into a bloody pulp. When my mom found me on the lawn, she instituted another pet ban.

This ban was broken a few months later when we found an abandoned kitten starving in the bushes. Of course, the cat turned out to be a human-hating-wild-anaconda-banshee that would attack the back of her legs as she fearfully snuck around the house.

I really loved that cat. He lasted pretty long, but one evening we went for a walk in the neighborhood when I noticed something odd in a box by the side of the road. I peered in to find our cat dead with a note scotch taped to his forehead that read, "I'm sorry I hit your cat with my car. I'm sure he was a nice pet."

My mom kicked herself for having once again lifted the animal ban. I think her own sense of guilt made the whole thing harder on her than it was on any of the kids.

Little did she know then that there would be more pets that would die brutal deaths in our future. The turtle we found would wind up going for a dip in the pool on the day my dad chlorinated. The eel (that always bit my mom during feedings while my dad was out of town) would eventually leap out of the tank and dry up on the living room floor, and our parrot would suffer a neurological disorder that gave it a thirst for flesh, as well as fatal seizures.

Our bad luck with animals would extend into our adulthoods. Once in college, my lawyer/sister called me all hysterical. "She's dead! She's dead! She's freaking dead!"

"Who!? Who!?" I demanded in terror as I clutched my heart.

Oh well, pets are dirty anyway.