Of cats and birds!

This is a story from my childhood that I think I have told to my kids. I was thinking about it the other day and thought I would blog about it, just in case I haven't passed it on, cause I think it is funny! Also, there are a lot of details that I probably never explained.

When I was 8 or 9 we lived in Warner Robins, Georgia. My cousin, Jane Gunderson came to live with us. Her mom (my mother's sister) had died a few years earlier and my other aunts had decided that her father (who was an under ground polygamist) wasn't taking good care of his children and so they had them taken away by the court. This is important, because my father, who hated cats with a passion, let Jane adopt a stray cat as long as it never came in the house.

During this same time period, Lorraine's mother (Donna Black Pearson) gave me a parakeet. Lorraine's parents were good friends of the family. Like most children of this age, I was very excited to have a pet, but once it came time to take care of the it, I wasn't so interested. Fortunately, for this particular bird, my mother really enjoyed it, so it quickly became her pet and I lost all interest.

We had lived in Georgia for 2 or 3 years, in a house my mother absolutely hated. So when a house around the block came up for sale we moved. This house was way cool, one of the neatest houses ever! I loved that house, but we didn't actually stay there very long, only a year and a half or so. I think this house, which was an A frame, is part of the reason my dad built the house he did in Port Tobacco, which was also a very cool house, but that is another story.

One of the fun things about this new house was that it had a sliding glass door to a really nice patio and a large back yard. My mother decided that our parakeet needed some sunshine in its life and would set the bird by the sliding door. Of course, now the cat had 2 reasons to sit by the door and meow. First it really wanted to come inside and secondly it wanted the bird.

Just a side note, I honestly don't remember if either pet had a name. It wasn't important to me, I guess.

Now my father, really did not like this cat. He hated that it sat at the door and meowed, partly because the master bedroom was on the same side of the house where the door was. Also, the lovely cat had kittens under the house, which happened to be under the master bedroom. All of which makes great sense to me as an adult, but I didn't understand at all as a child. This house, being in Georgia, didn't have a basement, but a crawl space. Our cat, had the kittens, but didn't have a clue as to how to take care of them. I remember going in the crawl space, which I thought was quite roomy, to bring the kittens out. They all died, because by the time we knew they were there they were quite malnourished. I really do understand, now why my dad was so angry.

Anyway, shortly there after an ultimatum was delivered. The cat had to go! Jane, was in tears, my dad was furious, my mom tried to make peace and I? Well, let's just say, I didn't get all the fuss.

Some of this part is a little fuzzy, probably because I didn't understand things. I remember driving in the car with my mom, Jane and the cat. I think the plan was to take the cat far enough away that it wouldn't come back. The idea being that since the cat had been a stray originally, it could take care of itself if we let it go in a different place. We drove what seemed a long way to me. However, if I remember correctly, the cat came back. (Sounds like a book title)

My dad, of course, was not a happy man. Tears, drama, fuzzy memory. I always hated it when people go upset and I probably hid in my room.

Next day the cat was gone again. I don't know if Jane got to go this time, probably not, because this time I'm pretty sure the cat went to the pound.

But again, we could hear meowing. My dad was angry, my mom and Jane totally innocent. The cat was gone, it really was, there was no way it could come back. More drama. This may have gone on for a few days, my father sure that cat was around and Jane and my Mom sure the cat could not be around.

Finally, on what I'm pretty sure was a Saturday morning, we found the source of the meowing. It was the parakeet! All that time sitting in front of the window with the cat meowing at it. The parakeet had learned to meow.

I, who was an innocent bystander in the whole affair, found this absolutely hilarious! Silly bird!

Just a side note, we still had this same bird when my family moved to Virginia. Now, my mother decided that the bird should be let out of its cage to fly around and we found that the bird had gone blind from sitting in the sunshine. After this one died my mother got another and another and continued to have a bird until after Brian died. I learned to hate my mother's birds, not because they were bad, but because one of my jobs was to sweep under the bird cage and they were messy things. Especially when we lived in Port Tobacco and the bird hung by the open stairway to the basement and I had to sweep bird seed out of the carpet on those steps, what seemed like every day. (I'm pretty sure it wasn't, but I was a teenager at the time.)

So there is the semi complete story of the parakeet that meowed.