RALSTON
Jan. 4th 1998 - Feb. 6th 2004
A Remembrance by Bill Selby
I lost a dear, sweet friend. A loving friend who, despite my sometimes contrary curmudgeonly manner, gave me unconditional acceptance. A true friend, who, in the purest sense, and in surprising ways, helped deepen my connection to the world by opening previously locked emotional and spiritual doors.
My friend, all 36 feathered grams of her (soaking wet with a full crop and belly), was a feisty, iridescent green and yellow female budgerigar (budgie or parakeet to those yet to be initiated into the mysterious world of melopsittacus undulatus) named Ralston.
Ralston wasn't the little lady's original name. When I first encountered her in the summer of 1998, she went by the exotic appelation "Verdie." In early 1998, two months before my better half, Christine, and I started dating, she had purchased the hyperactive ("TWEET! Hey! Look at me! TWEET!") baby budgie from a newly hatched, hand-fed, parakeet flock confined and fluttering at the old Sammy's Pet Store in San Francisco. Christine named her precious new fid (feathered kid) Verdie, which is French for green. Verdie represented freedom of choice to Christine, who, having just become a homeowner, finally didn't have to worry about a landlord putting the kibosh on having a bird.
Let me qualify by admitting I was always a dog and cat sort of guy. Cats more than dogs. Birds weren't on my life's radar. I considered winged beasties with annoyance and dislike. This negative impression was inherited from my mother, whose ornithophobia, fear of birds, started after being dive-bombed by a furry brown bat when she was a young girl. After the incident, Grandma Gert, convinced that her daughter would get head-lice, ruined my mom's luxuriant, thick black hair by washing it with some quasi-toxic home remedy. By the time mom's hair grew back, her fear of bats with membranous, leathery wings had grown through traumatic association to include any creature in the animal kingdom who flew.
Small wonder, when Christine introduced me to Verdie, I bristled. Why couldn't my new girlfriend have a normal pet like a goldfish or hamster? Why did she have to have a pet at all? Regrettably, the bird was part of my new relationship package, and like it or not, if I wanted Christine, I had to learn to accept it.
From the gitgo I ignored the baby bird's given name, Verdie, and took to sardonically calling the tiny monster "Ralston," after Ralston's Purina Cat Chow. Before long, Christine, whose sense of humor, like mine, tends toward the stygian, began, with good-natured acceptance, to join me in calling her clamorous chirping child "Ralston."
Each morning I went into detached observer mode as Christine gave Ralston fresh food, water, and changed the paper at the bottom of the cage. While I had nothing to do with sustaining the ill-tempered mini-raptor, Christine constantly played with the malevolent poop machine. She cooed to it, lavished it with attention, taught it to step up onto her finger and say "Hello, baby!"
But a funny thing happened.
Refusing to intuit my ingrained dislike of winged pests, Ralston persisted in flying to me and landing on my shoulder. No matter how many times I shooed her away she kept coming back like a featherweight boomerang.
I growled at her. She squawked back at me, bold, unmoving. I meowed. She held her ground. No effect. I hissed. She nailed me with a defiant stare. I shrugged my shoulders mightily and hopped up and down like a bunny but she dug in, anchored to my T-shirt. I shooed her away countless times, but she was an obstinate mosquito homing in on me, again and again, nuzzling my beard with her head and tweeting sweetly in my ear. Every time I entered the room she excitedly approached the front of her cage and let loose with "Hello, baby!"
The effort it was taking to dislike the damned bird was wearing me down; cracking ice heralding a thaw.
One day, Christine handed me some millet and pointed to Ralston. I wavered, telling myself that if I really wanted to seal the deal with my human mate and get in her good graces, I should comply. Whatever the reason, I surprised myself by volunteering a tentative index finger to Ralston, who stepped up without hesitation and began to eat hungrily. I was amazed. And sort of thrilled.
Growing up in Ohio, birds were something to be seen at a distance, flying through the air or perched high on a leafy branch. Now I was holding a bird and feeding it, up close and personal. How could I not begin to care for this small spirit?
Remarkably, from the time she first met me, Ralston sensed something I had never known about myself or embraced: I was a bird person.
The attitude shift was slow, steady, a gentle wind dusting my cobwebbed heart. I started helping Christine feed Ralston in the mornings and believe it or not, after a while even began changing the poo-specked paper at the bottom of the cage.
Call me demented, but I even got used to getting shat on, seeing it as a sign of great affection, a badge of interspecies friendship (I just bought more T-shirts). If I called out, "Here, Ralston!" from fifty feet away in another room of the house, my Lilliputian girlfriend would drop whatever she was doing and fly to me, adroitly landing on my extended finger or shoulder or sometimes my balding head if she misjudged her speed and distance. When visitors came, I'd devilishly position them between Ralston and me, then call out to her, delighting as my darting, fleet-winged, kamikaze, strafed and startled the crap out of them to come in for a three point landing on me.
For her first two years on Earth, Ralston was our one and only, the most spoiled bird in all San Francisco, if not the entire state of California. She had our undivided attention. But Christine and I began to fret that perhaps Ralston was lonely while we were at work, so we bought her a companion, dubbed "Kaboo," short for P. Kaboo (get it?).
Ralston grew close to Kaboo, and within a month began to prefer Kaboo's birdie company. I felt pangs of jealousy, but resigned myself. Like the song says, it's nature's way. Tragically, just as Ralston was beginning to bond with her cage-mate (who, in same gender bliss, turned out to be a girl), Kaboo spooked, flew into a closet, broke her neck and died almost instantly. Chris and I were heart-broken, and after this incident, undertook clipping Ralston's wings just enough to keep her from winging up a good head of steam and possibly injuring herself.
"Tiko" was our next (and final) attempt at finding Ralston a mate. He was also our last store-bought 'keet; a timid, beautiful, not-too-bright, probably inbred, powder blue, creamy white and pastel yellow male who could talk to himself in a mirror for days on end - if Tiko were human he wouldn't be able to put M&M's in alphabetical order. True to form, Ralston instinctively knew he was her mental and physical inferior, and bullied and stressed the submissive little guy until we finally had to get him a separate cage.
Yet, I still couldn't help feeling that Ralston was lonely. She needed a companion. A bird more her equal. See the problem? Would I be telegraphing how events played out by revealing that anthropomorphizing, projecting my feelings onto Ralston was only the first step down the slippery slope whose only destination could be MORE BIRDS?
Which leads me to Mickaboo Cockatiel Rescue here in San Francisco. Soon after one of Christine's co-workers introduced us to her sweet-natured female pied, I, who had mutated from bird-hater to bird-lover, started thinking about getting a larger feathered friend. After some investigation, we decided to adopt a bird in need. If you've ever considered a companion bird, I heartily suggest a bird rescue such as Mickaboo.
Fast forward four years: our birdy brood ballooned to six cockatiels. Alfie and Tookie, both adopted from Mickaboo, and their hand-raised, by us, from eggs, offspring; Riley, Avis, Tweeter and Buckley. In addition to Tiko, we also adopted Lefty, a spunky one-winged female budgie. Last but certainly not least, we rescued Terwilliger, a fabulous boy budgie, born totally blind (his story would melt your heart). Sometimes I feel like living in our house is akin to being trapped in a Warner Bros. Looney Toon.
By 2004, aged six years, Ralston had had to adjust to having mom and dad's attention divided among the entire flock. She never worked through her jealousy. Even recently, if she saw me giving another bird a head scritch, she'd approach and take a couple of indignant pecks at the interloper.
Although Christine and I eventually had ten birds, Ralston was always our first. Our Alpha. The ever-regal queen who taught our other birds to chorus "Hello, baby!"
She was out of her cage several times a day, rousting barely tolerated bird-mates away from treats of millet, corn, or the highest perch on the manzanita tree stand.
Ralston could be aggressive, territorial, and downright mean. Maybe she was too strongly imprinted with humans early on - me especially. She demanded my attention. Most times I obliged, a hulking rhino to her symbiotic ticky-bird. I gave her food and shelter and she gave me unconditional acceptance. I never raised my voice in anger toward her or treated her badly or with neglect. I earned her trust and she had no fear of me or any other human.
The only thing she was afraid of was a fluffy, yellow, budgie-sized toy ducky, whose mechanical "tweet-tweet-tweet" was activated by the heat of your palm.
Yet, she inexplicably loved the bird clock in the kitchen that chirruped every hour on the hour, and would spend great lengths of time perched on top in anticipation, chattering, patiently waiting for the invisible birds inside the clock to come out to join her.
Ralston was pretty much devoid of any maternal instinct. Though we kept her separated from the male budgies, she would periodically lay and destroy her unfertile eggs. In 2002, when she became eggbound, I sat up all night with her waiting for the vets office to open in the morning. She had a close call but was strong and pulled through. After that, we gave her periodic hormone shots to deter her from laying.
Strong fond memories: when Ralston was wet she smelled like soy sauce. Whenever I opened my mouth wide she'd try to feed me. She relished being kissed. Sometimes her breath smelled like parsley, other times Roudybush pellets. As a youngster she preened madly like a teenaged girl before a date; in later years the primping became more genteel, ladylike. She absolutely loved cold wet clumps of parsley, clothes-pinned inside her cage, and would wallow, bathe, make violent love to the fresh green sprigs. The only good cuttlebone was an obliterated cuttlebone. The slight, dainty, wiggle of her birdy-butt and tail feathers before a satisfying poo never failed to make me smile, and her gentle muttering when contented, gladdened my soul.
We found her on a Friday morning sitting on the bottom of her cage, unable to stand, eyes lidded, feathers ruffled to try and keep herself warm. I held her, talked to her, but she was too weak to respond. We rushed her to our avian vet, where she died during the examination. The vet asked if we wanted a necropsy performed to determine the cause of death; I couldn't bear the thought of her being cut open and declined.
Ralston's death was unexpected. Awful. I was shocked at the depth of my grief, my tears for the strong, fragile green and yellow bundle of tenacious feathery life-force that fancied my company, that always seemed to love me even when I could not always love myself.
We brought her home. Christine placed her in a small wooden cigar box along with some favorite toys. I added parsley and millet. Ralston laid in state on a small table in the living room beside the bay window, flanked by candles, personal photos, and a statue of St. Francis holding a bird. The ritual was sad but also very healing. For two nights we lit the candles and remembered how funny, endearing, and full of life she was, how her chirruping filled the house. On the third day, Sunday, we buried her in our back yard garden, up on the hill beneath a pine tree attended by vocal sparrows, doves, and blue jays. Christine planted a green jade bush on her grave. It's a lovely spot that catches the late afternoon sun. Wind chimes play from a nearby branch.
Her life was good. And it made mine better.
Love transcends species; human, dog, cat - it doesn't matter. In my case it took a little bird with a big attitude to help teach me how to go where the love is.
She always came to me when I called.
Now, she'll always come when I recall her, spirit soaring happily within, making a three-point landing.
"Thank you, baby girl. I will hold you until my last breath."
