The Note

T h e  N o t e 

Whenever I have nothing to say, there's always the Pete the Parakeet story. I can't believe we got this deep into our relationship without you knowing this story.

Pete was our parakeet when I was growing up. Budgie if you are reading this in the UK or Australia or other places that care about using the proper names for things. Pretty good bird. Never learned to talk, but this was my boyhood home in Arkansas, some decades ago, and there were a lot of people who never learned to talk. So, nonverbal Pete flew around the house, amusing us and pooping on drapes and lampshades. You know, those little white droppings with the black dot. (Or, were they black with a white dot?)

Our house was not centrally air-conditioned. We had a very large, powerful, metal window fan. (Some of you, at this point, know where this story is going.) This was not one of these lame plastic fans that are sold these days. It was 100% metal and more industrial than residential. I can't find an image on the Internet that does it justice. Let's just say it's closer to this

next

than this. 

(By the way, if you Google "Giant Fan" you get a lot of images like this.)

This fan pulled air out of the house, creating a substantial movement of fresh air in through windows and open doors. As a safety measure, there were screens on both sides of the fan to save fingers and hands from traumatic amputation. I was raised to think that, at any moment, if I made the wrong move in life, I'd end up staring, in shock, at a nub pumping out arterial blood.

My mother took the screens off for cleaning one day and, in retrospect, running the fan without the screens and with a loose parakeet in the house might not have been the way to go. She came to regret it.

So, WHACK Pete hit the fan and was instantly divested of each and every feather on his little body. It's hard to describe what a very powerful metal propellor, running full-speed, will do to a very small bird. Maybe it will help if I use this analogy. Suppose a small bird is sucked into a very heavy industrial metal fan driven by a powerful electric motor and the bird collides with one of the fan's massive steel blades. That'll give you a rough idea.  

Now this fan exhausted out onto our 2-car carport. (Don't scoff. This was Arkansas. A 2-car carport means you've arrived.) The feathers were arranged in a layer all over the surface of the carport. (2-car.) There was a stunning amount of tiny, blue, downy feathers on that carport, given that Pete's actual body was about the size of a lumberjack's thumb. (Speaking of traumatic amputations.) This is how I learned that birds are mostly feathers. We also learned that it's surprisingly difficult to sweep up downy little feathers outdoors.

Sometime after that we had some relatives visit. We told the story. We described the sickeningly final sound of Petey, uh, hitting the fan. We told of the morbid carpet of feathers on the carport.  One relative, a young woman who had recently married into the family, asked, on learning of Pete's loss of all his feathers, "Did they grow back?"

As I mentioned, this was Arkansas.

R.I.P. Pete

Here's issue 53. Thanks to all the contributors and to all who submitted and whose work we regret we couldn't accept. Thanks to my colleagues F. John Sharp and F. J. Bergmann. Thanks to you.

Dale