AFTER almost eight years, our favorite Christmas caroler has gone silent.
It shook me. It shouldn’t have. Our parakeet Rocky had looked kind of slow that morning and the night before. But she’d pulled through tough times before.
Not this time.
Three hours after I left the house, my phone rang.
“Scotty?” Heather said, voice shaking. “Rocky’s dead.”
The shock hit at once. Maybe you’re never ready for this.
“I’m coming home.”
My wife Heather has always been a bird person. It’s a family trait — her sister has turned every living space she’s ever had into a miniature aviary and even converted her new husband to “birdie love.” So when Heather and I started out in a Garden City apartment, it was only natural that a fine feathered friend would come along sooner or later.
Rocky joined us in early 1999. Her name came from a shock of blue and yellow tail feathers that looked like a rocket taking off, contrasting sharply with her green body. And it didn’t take long for her to establish herself as a character with a capital C.
She would turn her swing sideways before standing on it, then wonder why she fell off.
She would try to stand on a rotating star toy. Same result.
She learned whistles, but in her own way. We tried to teach her two: The classic “wolf whistle” used to signal an attractive person walking by and the sharp “taxi whistle” used to call a cab. She combined them. If an especially beautiful taxicab came by, she was set.
She fell in love with the piano, often singing along as I played. One night after we moved to Emporia, she developed night terrors, bouncing around her cage like it was on fire. It took three songs on the piano to calm her down, but she never had night terrors again.
Christmas was a mixed blessing for her. It took her years to get used to having a Christmas tree towering nearby. But it also meant a lot of Christmas carols on the piano and a new toy for her cage, so on balance, Rocky did pretty well by the season.
That’s only fair. On balance, we did pretty well by her.
And now she’s gone.
It’s never easy to lose someone close, whatever their species. And losing someone at the holidays can seem doubly hard. In the midst of all the joy and celebration, there’s a friend-shaped hole in your heart that just won’t be filled.
It hurts. And it’s going to hurt for a while. You can’t hurry it.
But you can remember.
Good times. Silly times. Quirks and habits. All the things that add up to someone special. After all, the life of a loved one is a powerful gift. And this is a time to remember powerful gifts.
For all the pain, the love is worth having.
We buried Rocky by the front window, near the outside birds she had sung to so many times. Heather had a thought, went inside a moment, came out with a favorite toy of Rocky’s. She laid it next to the box and then began to drop potting soil on the hole.
I stayed outside for a moment or two after Heather went back in, just thinking. Then, softly, I whistled Rocky’s call. A wolf whistle and a taxi whistle, intertwined.
The singer was silent. But her song lives on.
Scott Rochat’s e-mail address is rochat@emporiagazette.com.