My English Professor last semester was complaining to us about how the school library was charging him for losing a book he’d returned. I work in the library, so after class I did some poking around and found the book on the shelf and took it to the head librarian. It turned out it just hadn’t been checked in, which was an easy enough fix. I wrote an email to the Professor letting him know that I’d “taken care of the problem” and it “shouldn’t bother him anymore,” signed it with my full name, and sent it.
Now might be a good time to mention that I have a very Italian name. For the rest of the semester, my roommate and classmates referred to me as the leader of the Librarian Mafia.
This one only 35% happened because it happened to my grandparents’ neighbours like 50 years ago and I heard it from my dad. So since there are so many go-betweens that I can’t personally guarantee to you that this otherwise exceptionally hilarious story is true, I’m going to play it safe with modest percentages.
Also, it involves mentions of dead animals (spoilers: they’re not really dead, which is kind of the point as you’ll see) SO if this is something that upsets you, it’s probably best if you don’t read it.
Like pretty much all of my other rl stories, this one also involves Evil Commie Land and food shortages, except it takes place in a village. The thing with romantic countryside living in Evil Commie Land is that it was both worse and better than living in the city. It was worse because the State took your land and declared it Official State Land and then made you work on it and only gave you a fraction of what you produced, and that pissed people off (we’ll get to that in a bit); but also better because you could raise some chickens and maybe a pig or two for yourself, so you wouldn’t have to go around working the Official State Land while malnourished.
Once upon a time when my dad was a small, carefree and, judging by this story, a tad impressionable child, my grandparents’ neighbours had a bunch of lovely geese which they loved because these geese laid eggs on the regular and occasionally became soup. And the way they kept these geese fed was, like pretty much everyone else, they’d let them loose to graze on Official State Land while the administrators either looked the other way or were forced to confront a cheerful, intractable innocence of the ‘Why comrade, they’re just a bunch of dumb animals that wander off sometimes’ variety.
So these geese would go out in the morning, spend the whole day eating and then come back home in the evening the same way they’d gone, which they knew by heart because they’d been doing this every single day of their placid lives. These geese didn’t get lost because they weren’t smart enough. So one evening when they didn’t show up, my grandparents’ neighbours went looking for them, and about halfway they found the whole flock lying limp, motionless and apparently very dead in the dirt. Cue oh no, our beautiful birds, what shall we do come winter etc. etc.
What they didn’t know was that someone in the village had made moonshine that day and thrown away the leftovers – we’re talking fruit that’s been fermented to shit in a giant barrel for weeks, distilled twice in someone’s basement and then thrown out in a ditch with other leftovers. So any wandering, say, birds that were used to taking their lunch anywhere they could find it might be excused for helping themselves.
The geese weren’t dead. The geese were blackout drunk.
In the absence of this knowledge though, my grandparents’ neighbours thought their birds had been struck dead by some terrible insta-kill virus and decided that, food shortages be damned, they’re not about to eat things that had died in such mysterious circumstances. But this was also a time when people had learned to waste as little as possible. So my grandparents’ neighbours picked up every goose and, with minimal physical contact, plucked them. But like, not completely. They just took the little soft down feathers that are so nice and comfortable in pillows and left the patchy, half-plucked and still apparently super-dead geese in a ditch outside village limits.
And as the story goes, the geese woke up sometime the next day, decided that since they were in surroundings other than they familiar yard it meant that they probably had gone out to graze, so they ate for a while and then went home as usual. So now imagine a bunch of patchy, half-plucked, supposedly dead as fuck geese that the entire village had heard about because my grandparents’ neighbours were really upset. Imagine them waddling home all well-fed and chill and completely oblivious of people’s utter horror because zombie fucking geese
trust no one, especially snake hands jimmy, his hands are snakes.
My Congo African Grey picks up stuff REALLY fast. Sometimes he’ll piece together stuff that’s hilarious.
Yesterday I was sitting next to him reading, and he was preening quietly so I told him he was being really good — giving them attention when they’re not screaming gives them the option of not screaming when they want attention, so I try to do this a lot.
His response? He said in a friendly tone, “You’re a really good Nattie. Haha. I love you, bitch.” My husband and I use obscenities as casual endearments.
Then sometimes he’ll throw stuff together in Engrish-y ways that almost make sense. The other day we were moving, so I put Bongo (the African Grey) and our cockatiel in their travel cages so I could take their huge cages apart to stick in the truck. Bongo didn’t like this, so he decided to lift up his water bowl, which lifts the food cup door, and throw it on the floor. Shocked, I said, “You douche!” Bongo yeowled, this hilarious gibberishy cat-like sound. My husband came in and asked what happened, and Bongo said, “Yes, that became water now.” I want to put that on a shirt with like, a picture of an anthropocentrized flower or something.
Other times he’ll say stuff that makes sense, logically and grammatically, that he’s put together on his own, but it’s just funny. The other day we were sitting in silence for a while, when Bongo suddenly let out this long sigh and said, “Well, I guess I *am* Bongo,” not in a revelatory tone, but in the same grudging way someone takes responsibility, like when someone says, “I guess I *am* the adult here.” I blinked at him and said, “Alright. How does that make you feel?” and he just gave a weary “hm” and started preening, like there was nothing to be done for it so we may as well move on with life.
On a less philosophical note, a few weeks ago we put the birds to bed, which basically means just putting them in their cages and covering them. Most nights, Bongo does not want to go to bed, but that night he REALLY didn’t want to. He tried to scramble back out of the cage but wasn’t fast enough. He then clung to the side as my husband wrapped the blanket around, and, adopting my husband’s raging-at-Mortal-Kombat voice, yelled, “Nooooooooooooooooo!” We cracked up because we couldn’t help it, which he did not seem to appreciate. He fell silent once the blanket was in place. Then we flicked the light switch off, and Bongo said simply, “Fuck.”
Bongo is awesome. Parrots are awesome. When we lived in Texas, there was a breeder who said that her breeding parrots would speak some human to their chicks, like “good girl” and “here’s some nummies” when feeding them. Bongo uses both when he talks to our cockatiel, which is positively creepy since they hate each other; he’ll climb on Precious’s cage to harass him, and say, “Come here Precious” and snicker, and when Precious starts squawking in outrage, he says, “Calm down, Precious,” or (more rudely) “Shut up, Precious.” What’s especially amusing about this is we practically never said those things to Precious because Precious didn’t scream as much as Bongo used to; we’d say “calm down, Bongo” instead, but he says Precious. He also tries to blame his own screaming on Precious if I’m out of the room: he will scream a lot, and if I eventually say anything back telling him to knock it off, he says “shut up Precious.” And then screams again. (He doesn’t scream much anymore after I started being more alert to enforcing and ignoring certain things.) Precious also does this horrible, scratchy barking sound in imitation of an alarm clock we had when he was a baby, and Bongo will start whistling La Cucaracha whenever Precious starts in on this because Precious LOVES La Cucaracha and will instantly start singing instead.
It is always interesting to me to see different ways Bongo figures out how to use sounds to change stuff around him. One of my favorite things he likes to do is sit on the back of my wooden office chair, and he will start banging his beak rhythmically on it, which is a normal bird thing, especially with male birds (Precious does it too). But if I start making percussive beat boxing noises, he will keep banging his beak AND make a clicking sound AND put his wings up and dance a bit. The rhythm is shaky but it’s super cute. If he wants to get my attention, he knows I will do that with him for a while. He also likes to sing, “Boooooongo, Booooongo biiiiird,” in it sometimes, just whatever notes he feels like.
But what’s been REALLY great, is Bongo’s about to turn six, so for the last year or so he’s been transitioning to adulthood more fully. He seems to have gotten much smarter — like, quicker to understand things — and mellowed out over this time. The other week I was sick and lying in bed, really tired, but Bongo was freaking out wanting to see me so my husband brought him in the bedroom and left him on the chair I mentioned earlier. Bongo started gibbering and laughing and talking to me a bunch, which cheered me up, and I didn’t want him to feel ignored so I kept up for twenty minutes or so. Finally, though, I was just too tired, but Bongo kept talking. I tried to think of a way to explain, not really knowing if anything would work, but not wanting to upset him. When we put the birds to bed at night, we say, “It’s bedtime!” so that seemed like an option. Then he knows that “mommy” is me, plus he had started using it as an adjective — he started saying “want mommy kiss” a year ago.
So I try, “It’s mommy bedtime.” To my surprise, he stops talking abruptly, then says, “Okay.” And he stayed completely silent while I took a nap. When I woke up, he said in a bright British accent, “Hullo!”
Meg's Mumbles 