The Love Birds? © 2000

Then we were a young suburban family.

My husband was menswear manufacturer…I was an Interior Designer.

The little girls went to school by bus daily.

Since my husband Arthur & I, worked in the city, we had a housekeeper, to be there, when the girls came home from school.

No shoelace with a housekey, & skate key around their necks, like we had as kids. We would each go home to an empty apartment, let ourselves in, while both our parents worked. I hated that!

After a snack and homework, I’d skate to the library, the playground or to my dad’s butcher shop in the Blake Avenue Market. My mother brought him a hot, homecooked meal every weekday. My dad hated “dry sandwiches”. He wanted soup with European rye or Pumpernickel bread slathered with butter…delivered by his wife. Then mama would stay and help him in the store & do her marketing from the pushcarts on both sides of the avenue.

They didn’t come home until he closed his shop.

Well, back to the bird story, from Long Island.

Things happened as they do routinely, until that day Arthur decided to surprise me with a pair of Love Birds, in a cage. He knew I loved bird motifs in fabrics, paintings, sculpture. So, this gift he brought me was heartfelt.

We soon learnt that our pair of Lovebirds HATED each other!

They squawked, screamed and hissed at one another. It was like chalk on a very dry blackboard amplified and directed to my nerve endings.

Our dog Mopsey’s eardrums rebelled! She too hated our hateful lovebirds.

Mopsey would run into any room the birds were, jump, snarl, & bark viciously.

What turmoil these creatures caused in our house which until their arrival, was a bland peaceful one.

The housekeeper Bernadette could not stand them either. They fluttered their wings fighting causing the seeds they ate to fly all over.

Even when we covered the cage, they make one screaming squawk in the quiet night, which was just enough to set Mopsey into a barking frenzy.

From that disturbance, on… the damn birds would stay, in the finished basement.

The final straw

Bernadette was home alone with “Frick” & “Frack”, the love birds that didn’t love.

She was cleaning their cage, left its door opened, out flew the f — -ken pair.

They flew wildly up our 2-story hallway picking away on its Grass cloth wall covering. High above the staircase they grabbed onto.

When we got home from work the girls, Bernadette, Mopsey, & I, were terrified of them. (Remember Hitchcock’s “The Birds”)?

Until Arthur being 6'4"& the purchaser of the unloving lovebirds, came home, we all ran out of the house.

It was not an easy task for him. Cussing mad was he.

He finally caught the escaped fugitives.

Coincidently, we were leaving on a long-planned cruise, for 2 weeks.

I called a friend Sandy who said, “I love birds, I would be glad to watch them while you’re on vacation”.

“Just leave them on my porch, on your way to JFK as I won’t be home". Hurrah, Hurrah!

“Don’t tell Sandy they belong to her now”! We chuckled.

After we returned, from the cruise, we didn’t take her call for a week or two.

We did not want them back!!!

Then she sent a message to my phone, “I gave your f — ken birds to a deaf neighbor. He & they love each other.”

End of Story