An Unexpected Parrot

From about fifty meters away, it looked very much as if a man was pushing a toddler swing with a parrot perched on the bar. As I gazed incredulously, a tall thin jogger slowed down to ask, in American English, “Is that a parrot?” “Seems to be,” I answered.

It was late on a Friday afternoon. The winter sky was clouded over, and the light didn't appear to be coming from any particular direction. I was walking our dog, a fairly large, brown mongrel, before showering and changing clothes for the Sabbath.

The dog and I slowly approached the swings to get a better look. I said hello. The man returned my greeting. The parrot's tail was bright orange-red. Its plumage was healthy-looking, mainly gray with some black stripes. I didn't want to get too close, because I thought the dog might scare the parrot. The man gently pushing the swing was above middle height, thin, in his fifties, dressed in a greenish, military-style jacket, wearing a baseball cap, smoking a cigarette, and holding a ceramic cup, presumably of coffee.

The swings, which my grandchildren love, stand on a grassy area in the midst of carob trees, planted in regular rows at a regular distance from each other – clearly a relic of the time when my Jerusalem neighborhood was the sparsely populated edge of an Arab village.

“Why doesn't he fly away?” I asked the man in Hebrew.

“Because I clipped his wings,” he answered in an accent I couldn't place right away.

The parrot ignored the dog, and the dog ignored the parrot. The man and I began a conversation.

“He likes to swing, doesn't he?”

“He's usually in a small cage,” the man explained, “and I have to take him out every once in a while to make him happy. He gets edgy when he can't move around.”

From there we went through the obvious questions and answers, though I didn't ask him why he didn't buy a bigger cage for his pet. How old was the parrot? (Young, just a year and a half). They live a long time, don't they? (Fifty years or more, as long as a person). Did he let him loose in his house? (No, because the parrot left droppings all over the place, but they didn't small as bad as human feces). Did it talk? (A little). And so on.

As the man talked, it became clear to me that he was an Arab.

The conversation drifted onto the subject of animal intelligence. The parrot's owner thought that even the smartest animal was no smarter than a four-year-old child, because no animal could find its way home from a strange place. Though I know that isn't true, I wasn't going to express a difference of opinion. Maybe the parrot wouldn't be able to find its way home.

I wanted to ask the man about his family, where he lived, and what he did. I thought he might know who the carob tree plantation once belonged to, but he wasn't interested in that. Instead, he told me that all we ever possess is the meter and a half of ground we're buried in. The earth and the sky belong to God. Then he began to talk about fate – whether we live or die is in God's hands. He pointed up to the gray sky.

What can you do when someone talks to you like that? Just nod in agreement.

After the theological discussion was over, I told the man I hadn't wanted to get too close to the parrot, because I thought it might be afraid of the dog. No problem, said the man. He finished his coffee, discarded his cigarette butt, put the parrot on his shoulder, and approached us. The parrot, clearly fond of its owner, had no interest in the dog, and the dog didn't notice the parrot. He sniffed at the man's jeans. I was afraid he might pee on him. He's done that once or twice. The man leaned over to pat the dog: Arabs usually don't like dogs, but this man was atypical. The dog enjoyed the man's patting.

I told the man I had to get going. He wished me a good Sabbath, got into his car, an old tan Opel, and drove off with the parrot on his shoulder.