Where you send in words and pics and I put my feet up (send to peter.b.abrahams@gmail.com). And now over to Mary L., who sure knows how to tell a story:

Chipper.

Chipper was our childhood Budgie. My Mother bought it and he lived in a cage in the corner of the kitchen but was allowed out on occasion. He was turquoisy-blue. Not sure how he got his name.

I don’t have any photos of Chipper, although I think there may be some in the family album or even some video. I’ve had to resort to stealing, I mean, researching images from the internet.

Budgies are native to Australia and are naturally green and yellow. The turquoise and blue ones are the result of one gene mutation and all of the blue ones are descended from one common ancestor. Who must have been wickedly prolific.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/science/biology/gene-mutation-gives-budgerigars-their-colours/

I’m not sure where our budgie came from or whose idea it was. I do know my Grandparents in Germany had budgies and perhaps my Mom grew up with them and that is where the idea came from. We visited my Grandparents in their small apartment in Ansbach, Germany when I was 12 and they had a green budgie named Hans but called him Hanse as an endearment. I think at one time they also had one named Fritz and another called Peter. Peterle. So pretty sure there was a budgie in the house at some point when my Mom was growing up. They seemed to be lifelong budgie owners. Perhaps even a cat as I think my Mom was a cat person or at least knew cats. We briefly had a kitten named Bill Bailey who was returned within a week for fleas and a propensity for sleeping in the clean laundry basket. My Mom did not know anything about dogs whereas my Dad did know about dogs. I think his family may have had one at some point.

Chipper was a pretty smart and active bird. He interacted with the family played with toys and did learn to talk. They say that birds will either play with toys or talk but not both, but he did both profusely. They also said never to put a mirror in their cages or they won’t interact with you but that didn’t seem to be the case either.

Chipper had a peanut butter jar lid full of toys on the huge second hand color TV we had in the living room. I grew up with a very small black and white TV in a wooden cabinet that had little doors that closed over the small screen. (Probably at most a 10 inch screen measured diagonally.) I watched Romper Room and Princess Morning star, Howdy Doody and Captain Kangaroo on that little black and white. Also likely second hand and brought to California from Connecticut when we moved when I was around 3 years old. Man, I sure wish I had that TV now.

The second hand color TV had tubes and would run hot and then couldn’t hold the horizontal and the colors would go wonky so my Dad took the back off and put a small fan in it. A black metal job with propellers like an airplane. We had to turn the fan on before turning the TV on and then remember to turn if off after we shut it off. Sometimes in the summer it would be so hot that even the fan couldn’t keep the TV cool. We also had to crank up the sound to hear it over the fan.

Chipper had his PB lid on the top of the TV. His wings were clipped but he could still fly short distances. So in the evenings when we were watching Bonanza or Jackie Gleason, he got to play with his toys on the top of the TV. There were shiny copper pennies he would pick up with his beak and nibble on, turning them like a wheel, there were some small Christmas jingle bells and there were some gold rings for curtains that were about the size of the old silver dollars. Chipper’s favorite activity was to pick up a toy, walk to the front edge of the TV, drop it, tilt his head, watching it fall and bounce on the carpet. Then he would go back to his lid, fetch another, walk to the edge, drop it and watch it bounce. When the lid was empty he would then screech until someone picked up all of his toys and refilled his lid. In this he may have been part dog.

We indulged him.

At some point he was spending most of his time sitting on the top of the cage or on the curtain rods in the living room room except at night when he was put inside to sleep with a cover on the cage. At least in the evenings when the doors weren’t constantly being opened risking him flying off. More on that later.

Chipper would often join us on the table for dinner. Again we indulged him although looking back it was kinda insane. He would wander the table, sampling from people’s plates. Bread, rice. Spaghetti night was a favorite of his. He would wander from plate to plate nibbling on the noodles. My Dad usually finished first and Chipper would even climb in his plate to get a few small bits. I know one night Chipper flew onto my Dad’s shoulder and left spaghetti sauce foot prints on his white work shirt. But that didn’t result in him being barred from the table. Like I said, we must have been insane.

We must have gotten Chipper after were returned to San Diego when I was in the fifth grade as I don’t remember him being in San Jose with us. When I was in the fourth grade we got Cuppy as that year we were in San Jose and we got her as a puppy. Again, I have no idea why we got a dog but I think my Dad might have instigated that one. We were in a rental duplex with a small fence back yard. Perhaps he felt guilty over the careless death of my childhood dog Mittens. I don’t remember Mittens but my Mom did tell me the story a few years ago. We were only in San Jose for a year and we moved back to our house for my fifth and subsequent grades. I think that is when we got the TV. We had Chipper until after I graduated from High School so he lived to be at least 7 years or more.

Cuppy and Chipper got along fine. Cuppy would nap and Chipper would pull on the hair between her toes or sit on her back and walk up and down. Cuppy was quite a good sport about it. She never once indicated at any point she would enjoy avian hors d’oeuvres with her kibble.

A few years after moving back we spent a week up in the mountains on a summer vacation. We didn’t get long for vacations as the minute school was out my Mom made sure we all went to summer school. In those days anyone could go and if you didn’t have to make up a class you could take enrichment classes or take a class early so that you could take an extra elective during the school year. So we only had a few weeks in August for our vacation. My Dad was into gold panning at the time and made some sluice boxes. He had a map or something and he bought or rented a second hand camper for the truck and we all went up into the mountains for a week. Slate Creek. Chipper came along of course. And Cuppy who had just had puppies the week before and their eyes weren’t even open. Like is said, insane.

The trip was nice except for the primitive bathroom conditions. My Mom, my sister and I slept in the camper and my Dad and brother slept in a tent outside. My Dad cooked breakfast and dinner over an open fire. The camper had a rudimentary stove and oven but most of the supplies lent themselves more to open fire cooking. Or as my Dad would call it, real camping.

While we were there my Dad panned, us kids played in the creek, Cuppy’s puppies opened their eyes and Chipper escaped from his cage.

Not sure how, I think someone let him out in the camper and then someone opened the camper door. At any rate he flew up into a pine tree. A really tall one. No way my Dad was climbing that tree, although my Mom cried. We put the cage outside and eventually he did come back and get in his cage. But it was a day of distress.

More distress on the way home as, it being August, there was a Santa Ana with temps in the low 100s, the camper wasn’t air conditioned and my Mom was crying that the puppies were going to die from the heat. We stopped at a gas station to get some newspapers to wet to put in the box and I went to the bathroom. And when I came out, the truck was gone. So I waited until someone noticed I was missing. In my opinion it took a lot longer than it should have. And it’s not like I didn’t tell anyone I was going to the bathroom. We were always taught to go to the bathroom at every opportunity, even if you don’t have to go, because you never know when the next opportunity will arise.

We spent years trying to teach Chipper to talk. We all used the same phrase and would stop by his cage to repeat it often. “Chipper is a dirty birdie.” He did finally learn it after a fashion and would often sit by his mirror in the evenings and coo it to his reflection.

When I was a junior in High School we hosted a foreign exchange student from Guatemala. Armando was quite taken with Chipper and tried to teach him to say something in Spanish but he had such an active social life on top of school that he couldn’t devote much time to it. He was disappointed that after the entire year was almost up, Chipper could only tell everyone how dirty he was. However, the day before he was scheduled to leave, suddenly Chipper said “Armando!” clear as day. Every morning my Mom would call Armando to breakfast from the bottom of the stairs. So Armando was rewarded with his name on the lips, so to speak, of our budgie.