The Parrot Who Ate Its Own Tail

Key West last Sunday night.  We are eating dinner at where the concierge of the hotel has assured me the locals go to eat, right by the water next to the band stand.  Bikers, rollerbladers, joggers and evening strollers pass by on the path between us and the sea.  An old lady catches my eye, she has a small parrot on her arm.  I have always wanted a parrot but this one has no tail just a bald, pinkish rear poking through.  As the path is literally right next to our table I ask her about the missing tail.

“He ate it.  He was stressed.  He didn’t like where we were living before.  It will grow back.”

“Oh poor thing.  Does he like where you live now?”

She hesitates, gives me a sad smile and a vague neither yes nor no nod of the head before moving on. 

The next morning out early for some guilt-reducing exercise, I again come across the old lady and her parrot.  She is putting the parrot into a small cage on the back of an old dusty bicycle.  Her new home is a square of sand on the beach in Key West.  She is not the only one who has spent the night on the beach but she is the eldest by far.

THE Desperate Housewife – a far cry from Wisteria Lane

Then I keep seeing them.  Elderly people living on the streets.  In Miami I came across this lady pushing her home in a supermarket trolley and obsessively cleaning the road in an OCD manner- undoubtedly mentally border-line. I get the feeling this is not a question of lifestyle choice but rather a sub-class of the elderly who have fallen through the net, no pension, no social security, no family and certainly no health care.

 

America needs a change of government fast.  We had a fabulous trip and were sad to leave but it is somehow reassuring to return to Switzerland, a country where the only threat to an elderly lady’s parrot’s sanity is boredom. 

Copyright Julesritter Snow in village March 2008