Party

I had a very good friend who used to say that she found birds really freaky because she could not read their eyes. She said cats and dogs and other animals had an expression in their eyes which you could see clearly, but birds had these vacant eyes and you never knew what they were thinking. She found pigeons in London particularly distressing.

On the other hand my grandmother had always a very special connection with birds. They did not seem to be scared of her at all and all sorts of birds used to actually fly very near her and sometimes come and sit very very close to her. On three occasions stray birds that must have escaped from their cages came to our house during my childhood. My grandmother just walked and with no fuss caught them in her palms. One was an orange canary called Pepito who we kept for several years as a pet, one was a white dove that was hurt and we nursed back to recovery till it could fly and the third was a brown and yellow canary that hit our window and looked dead but which my Grandmother nursed back to life and we called it Lazarus. This one outlived by quite a bit my Grandmother and was her favourite.

Despite this, my Grandmother had a very conflicting attitude towards pet birds and pets in general. She said that they were unhappy and felt trapped and that they would much prefer to be free. My mother had told me of occasions when my Grandmother actually released some of her own pets during her childhood without telling her until afterwards. Of course the birds who had voluntarily found their way to our house were somehow exempt from these beliefs  My most memorable pet in my early childhood was Cocos a little blue parrot who I mentioned in my first post Hello...hello. He was extremely intelligent and curious and very affectionate with me. He slept on my shoulder and could walk along my arm, over my head and down the other arm. He could kind of talk, but what he said did not make much sense. One day I found his door open and he was not in the cage. I used to leave his door open in the house so he could fly around with the windows closed, but his cage door was always closed when he was on the balcony. My mother said that he was so smart he must have learned how to open his door himself. It was the most anxious period of my life till then, as I could hear him calling around our house for days from the trees. He even replied to me when I called his name. But he never returned and after a week we stopped hearing him. I kept a diary about it and in the beginning I had long entries with when and where I heard him on each day, but slowly I wrote less and less and I remember it was a great first disappointment when I realised he was not coming back. For a while I suspected my Grandmother had released him to freedom but she always maintained she did not.

When my Grandmother passed away on the very next day a wild young falcon came and sat on her balcony. It was the most amazing bird I have ever seen and it was so close! The young falcon appeared for seven consequent days on my Grandmother's balcony. We really took it as a sign that her spirit was still alive. At the time there was talk of the summer fires driving wild birds away from the forests and of the numerous mobile phone antennas on our mountain confusing them with their signals so that they came in the city. Which of course was the real reason he was in Athens; but nevertheless
he had chosen her balcony just after she was gone, so we took that as a good omen since she loved birds so much.

Aretousa too has shown very early signs that she likes birds. She watches them very carefully when we are at the park. Her favourite is the owl, although she has never seen a real one. Today was her second birthday and for her party everyone had to wear a crazy hat. I forgot I wrote that on the invite till a day before the party, so we had to really make a hat very fast. I made one like a nest with two bird owls in it, one for each year. Aretousa wore it very proudly the whole day before her birthday; but on the actual party today she refused to try it on. But thankfully no one else remembered to wear a crazy hat either.

There is a kind of owl native in Greece and the Balkans, called a Boufos. I am not sure what bird it is exactly in English, but I think it's an Eagle Owl. My father and my mother built a small house on a remote mountain in the Peloponnese when they were married and very young. Their friends helped them out a lot and they all built it together themselves. My father still goes there very often today and my cousins and I used to go there for the Easter holidays when we were young. We always travelled to get there on Friday nights and as we were approaching the house in the car in the dark, long and very winding road amongst the forest, my father always told us a story. When they were young and the forest was even darker and more wild than today, they were driving their car at that same spot we were now when the lights fell on a creature in the middle of the road. The creature was a giant Boufos, the size of a small child, like us, and he was blinded by the car lights so that he was standing still as frozen in the middle of the road with wide open eyes. They didn't know what to do so they beeped the horn, but still he would not move. Then they turned the lights off and waited in pitch black darkness to hear him move or fly; but they heard nothing. Then they turned the lights on again and he was gone, as if he was never there. Every year we looked out to see one but we never did. The story was so vivid in us though, that years later when my cousin and I were talking we thought that it had happened to us when we were kids. When we asked my father he said that no, it was him it had happened to and we must have been been thinking of his story.