My mom’s parakeet died on my twelfth birthday. In the madness to Google search the morality of burying a pet bird in an old matchbox, my mom forgot to make me a cake. She gave me a multi-color pack of candles instead. Maybe if I had been turning eleven and not twelve, I would have been hurt, but since I was turning twelve and not eleven and on my way to a tumultuous middle school career, my pre-teen angst abated all feelings of anger I might otherwise have felt towards my mother. Yet, I stored the memory in my mind in a file marked “Suburbia” next to two files - one marked “Good Bad Music” and the other marked “Art”.
Nevertheless, I forgot the incident entirely. That is, until my girlfriend left me two weeks ago and I wondered what it would feel like to be buried in a matchbox. I’m no parakeet though. Thank God for that. I can’t imagine being compelled by genetics to sing twenty hours a day. That’s a fact by the way; parakeets sing twenty hours a day…
My mom often worried that having a parakeet, as a pet, in place of a dog or a cat, would affect me later in life. Having never had a pet dog or cat as a child, I cannot answer this question. I do wonder though, if my mom had baked me a cake on my twelfth birthday, instead of practicing the last rites on an already dead parakeet, would I be a better person today? I kind of doubt it.