elizabethlevett

I heard a funny story on the radio the other evening. It seems there is a couple here in the city who have a parrot in a cage. When they used to leave for work in the morning they would put the radio on the classical station so the parrot would have music to listen to while they were gone all day. Lately of course this couple is working from home. They have the classical station on all the time. They noticed suddenly that whenever Mendelssohn is played the parrot sings along beautifully with the music. Made me think about birds in cages. I understand. I love Mendelssohn too. I do find it a little tedious to listen to classical music after a while though. I start picturing rich people in tights. We get enough of that in the Marina District. (Those are not pants – sorry.) I can tolerate a certain amount of Beethoven – the Moonlight Sonata for instance – as long as he isn’t indulging in a string of those bombastic TA-TA-DAAAAAA finishes. Then there’s Chopin and Debussy, and Handel with that Water Music. All good. But there’s something about Mendelssohn. He’s almost like a bridge toward Scott Joplin, who is the famous bridge from Classical to early Jazz. With Mendelssohn I can almost see the grainy black and white images of a steam engine going rogue (“no brakes!”) across the landscape, a doe-eyed angel lashed to the tracks. This parrot is hip.

Birds in cages know all about sheltering in place. They can’t go anywhere, can’t fly cackling from redwood to pine like the famous wild parrots of Telegraph hill, sunning themselves in tall pines by the park and knocking down the cones looking for pine nuts. Birds in cages must go a little stir crazy. Bird cabin fever. But then there’s that other issue of having to stay home. No close contact with our friends. No hugs from my students. No sitting in a restaurant with a good friend. Birds aren’t mammals, but they are social. They don’t cuddle like we do, or do they? (Can’t you just see two mourning doves sidling up close to each other in the eaves of an old barn somewhere, keeping warm together?)

I can be pretty contented at home most of the time. But the close contact with others is something I do miss. “In you I find my rest.” I talked with a good friend who is single and he said, “No one has touched me in over a month.” Birds must get lonely too. I wonder if truly “It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” Do parrots get lonely? Something to consider…

Our parrot found something beautiful to focus on during his long hours of solitary confinement. The music was more than just a lovely background of sound though. You have to study pretty carefully to vocalize along with Mendelssohn. It must have become a practice, a discipline of sorts, something to do to avoid becoming stir crazy. I do not want to be stir crazy – longing to run through my house opening all the windows and singing loud, clearing out all the stuff I’ve been sitting here looking at for five weeks and have friends over for lunch. I’d be able to greet them at the door with a hug and we’d all sit up close together keeping warm. Until the time comes I want to be stirred toward a beautiful discipline like music or art or even cultivating my garden, where the birds sing all the time. They don’t know a thing about Mendelssohn. They have too much to do. And they get to go outside.