Who Buries a Parrot in a Jewelry Box?

I confess. I did it.

But what can a woman do when she finds her best friend—not bloody but dead—just right of the Christmas tree, in a skateboard box?

1) Heave and snot and enter some mild state of shock.
2) Curse the murderous ferret you never wanted but sheltered out of kindness for homeless creatures.
3) Drink or smoke or both until the pounding of your own head puts you to sleep.
4) Wake with those bags you think are make-up residue but aren’t.
5) Go to the closet with the dead-grandmother boxes and choose one.
6) Gather all the frayed ropes and tarnished bells and wood frames the parrot loved.
7) Write in sharpie marker on the mirrored inside of the lid.
8) Get duct tape, a hefty bag, a brick.
9) Drive to the volcanic rock at Lake Superior’s edge.
10) Seal it tight and blame yourself as it bobs and bobs and seems to be floating toward shore until it finally sinks.

So it goes. The answer…in a list of ten…a jewelry box, if you will (which is, I’m sure, missing #11: “be dramatic as hell,” but…). It’s a story I bring up now, because it came up over the summer when poet John Rybicki was here and again the other day when poet Sandra Beasley was here. Who takes someone on a tour to the lake’s edge (on what is probably their only visit to Marquette, MI) and says, “And here’s where I buried my parrot…”?

Yeah. Me. I just can’t help it. It’s a memorable thing, dropping your bird in a lake…in your grandmother’s jewelry box.

It was our first winter here, and we’d only recently discovered the cove at Presque Isle—what I’d later learn is a very popular spot for jumping from the black rock, as well as for scuba diving.

I knew from the moment I’d seen the cove, the lake itself, that I’d never know how to leave this water. Something that expansive, that dangerous, that painfully beautiful and in control…how could anyone leave. So when the bird was killed, and it was my fault for leaving two cages open at one time, I knew it was the spot. That water was the opposite of the bird. My parrot: Einstein, who flew into my spruce tree a few years earlier.

It was a day of deadlines. I was an undergrad at the University of WI-Green Bay, taking a Feature Writing class in the summer (15 weeks smashed into 6). I’d told my sons, then 5 and 8 to “go play…OUTside!” It didn’t take long for the first interruption…

“Mom, do we have parakeets in this area?”

I spent the rest of the day baiting a large, green bird.

A bowl of water, he drank. A handful of seeds, he came close. He ate from my hand but wouldn’t perch. I went inside, he squawked from the porch. A hawk was circling. The day was wasting.

By late afternoon, such a show had drawn a slight crowd. Neighbors wanted to know, How would I get it? What was I going to do with it? Where did it come from?

Eventually, a woman smarter than myself suggested a pet carrier. She brought it, I set it on the lawn, and the parrot flew inside. He turned around. He watched me. He was waiting for the door to shut, for the lock-latch to settle in its hole.

I was amazed. Something with wings that wanted nothing more than a cage. And he came to me, a single mother who was taking twelve credits and working half-time.

So when he died, I wanted to push him toward that place I’d felt such freedom. The water I’d respected and feared and admired like a church.

When I think about it tonight, nearly three years later—my life even busier, and the story having surfaced over and again with visiting writers and in a recent poem—I wonder: did I want to give him to a place where I felt free, where maybe he could be free, or was I looking to box and bag and tape my awe, my fear—those bright, green wings so willingly caged.