Bob Tarte by Enslaved by Ducks

Author:Enslaved by Ducks
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Animals, Personal Memoirs, Pets, Biography & Autobiography, Essays, Human-Animal Relationships, Birds
ISBN: 9781565127302
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2003-01-02T06:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

Creatures of Habit

People say you can get used to anything. Habits are habits, and repetition makes the most extraordinary events eventually seem commonplace. Back when Binky ran our lives, I learned not to bat an eye whenever I stumbled into our dining room while Linda was putting the bunny to bed. For most rabbit owners, making sure the pet has fresh food and water is sufficient. But Linda went the extra mile by treating Binky to a musical recital and me to the spectacle of my wife on hands and knees in the dining room with her head thrust through the door of the bunny’s cage while singing a lullaby she had composed.

’Cause he’s the bunny,

The very best bunny,

He’s the bunny for

You and me.

As she warbled the song, whose soaring melody suggested a hymn, Linda would pet Binky on the head while attempting to keep him from kicking away the pink hand towel she had draped across his back. One or two refrains of “The Very Best Bunny” typically provided all the happiness Binky could handle. Any more and he might bolt for the open door.

Pocket parrot Ollie’s bedtime ritual was even more remarkable. Linda would hide Ollie inside a knitted pink tam-o’-shanter she called his “night-night hat.” Clutching one end of the tam, she would swing it back and forth in the manner of a pendulum while scat singing a medley of American standards that usually included “Camptown Races” and “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?” Eager to see the performance as well as hear it, Ollie would attempt to crawl out of the tam. Once his head popped into view, Linda would snug the hat around his neck and flip him upside down in her lap. Instead of responding with his usual bad temper, he greeted this with excited chirps whose intensity increased as Linda stroked his head with a finger, carefully avoiding his snapping beak.

Neither wife nor parrot was shy about conducting this ritual in front of awestruck company. Linda once even tried instructing our pet-sitter Rhonda in the finer points of the complex ceremony, but our helper shook her head at the idea of mastering the “night-night hat” without months of study.

“How did you ever think this up?” asked a bewildered Rhonda. “How did he get in the hat in the first place?”

Like an ancient traditional dance whose movements have lost their meaning over the centuries, the “night-night hat” has origins that are cloaked in mystery. All we know for certain is that in the not-so-distant past, when Ollie squawked extensively while Linda worked in the kitchen, she occasionally popped him into the pocket of her apron, both quieting the bird and forcing him to live up to the epithet of pocket parrot. Depositing him inside the tam presumably evolved from there, but behavioral anthropologists disagree on the precise mechanism of the transition.

Every three months I endured a less obscure ritual of my own. In order to keep from plunging into the pocket

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