friday was calm and breezy, prosaic and easy. the sun ruffled warmly through the blind-slats, nicely and normally, toasting the wan little body of Nosferatu, my cat. Nosferatu:

Sometime in the afternoon, my friend Chris dropped by with her czechoslovakian neighbor, a baby african grey parrot, a beautiful cage, and some baby food. She gave me some hurried, confusingly convoluted explanation and wheeled her argentous, bold-nosed neighbor right out the door. As they drove away, I named the fluffy handful Pushkin, and I wheeled his cage into my room and figured out how to feed him with a syringe. Which is what I am doing in this picture:

He already knows his name. "Pushkin!" I cry enthusiastically, and I hear a brave burble of chirps and clucks, sounds Punchy used to make when she was a babybird. I also have a human pet, named Anthony, another member of ice cream creatures:

My father had an interesting pet history, aquiring a female lion in his early thirties. "All was well," he twinkly reminisced, "until she reached three hundred pounds and hid, craftily, behind the couch to pounce on me whenever she heard the sound of my car entering the driveway. It was dangerous." Carmel, the lion, was given to a zoo, and my father bought an Amazon parrot that would imitate the sound of a doorbell, and then scold the eager barking and scampering of my father's three Boxers (Sadie, Brutus, Buddy). (Sadie was my father's favorite dog, a champion, a carrier of cancer, and after she was euthenized my father never wanted another pet.)

Fed up with asking for years and years for a pet, any pet, I decided to make one using a can of tunafish (the only recognizable animal, to me), which I dutifully dragged around the school playground on its leash, through the gravel, past the swinging, singing kids. Tuna Buddy was confiscated from me by my teacher, Mrs. Holland, who said "it was a creepy thing" and called my parents. They caved in, bought me a chicken named Sunny that followed me to the park and slid down the slide, that died a year later at the hands of a careless neighbor's dog.

I don't really feel like writing any more, and I have an ice cream creatures practice to attend. here is a picture of me, taking a picture of you.

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