Who is the Parakeet?

Ever since waking up this morning, I’ve been preoccupied with the question who am I?  Not deeply, the words just keep rattling about lightly in my head.

When I was in middle school, a student’s pet parakeet escaped and had been on the loose for a few days.  My friend Kasia, who was good with parakeets and had several herself, offered to try to catch the bird for the student.

We found it in a flock of pigeons, eating some sort of bread or bird seed that had spilled on the ground.  Kasia had, in her hand, some sort of special parakeet treat and slowly approached the birds clicking at it.  Whenever she crossed some invisible line the pigeons flew away onto the nearby roof, and the parakeet went with them.  After she backed up and waited, they all returned.

After several unsuccessful attempts to lure the parakeet away, my teacher told her “I think it will be impossible.  It’s just going to follow the pigeons, so even if this bird isn’t afraid of you, the rest of them will stop you from catching it.”  Kasia gave it a few more attempts before admitting defeat.  But, as I watched, I was struck by how indifferent the birds were to their obvious differences.  The parakeet moved like the pigeons, eating the bird seed with the same jerky motions, and flew with them – always in the middle of the pack, never at the front, never at the back.

Who were we to tell this small green bird where it belonged?  If the parakeet didn’t mind, and the pigeons didn’t mind, what business of ours was catch this bird?  We could appreciate it’s beauty, which the pigeons seemed indifferent to, but all we could offer it was isolation in a cage.

These questions of “who are my people?” and “where do I fit in?” have always hung off the question “who am I?” for me.  Where am I from?  I don’t know how to answer that.  England?  Boston?  Virginia?  California?  A generic “Cambridge” as I have lived and spent my formative years in several?  An overarching “America” is generally not a good enough answer for people in the states, but out of the states I’ll alternate between “England” and “America” depending on the context.

But who will claim me when I’m lost?  Where do I “go home” to?

I don’t know whatever came of the parakeet.  Perhaps its differences were too great, and it died somehow – didn’t get enough food, was rejected by the pigeons, flew away and perished on some crazy, misguided migration instinct. Or, perhaps somehow magically it was guided back to its own kind somewhere tropical and perfect, who knows.

But – maybe, just maybe – it found a home with the pigeons.  It camped out with them in the heated awnings of our school during the winter, stealing food from the cafeteria trash.  Perhaps it had been bred to be a pet and drifted so much from the wild parakeets it could never return to them, and like the pigeons, could not survive without the cast out food and warmth of humans.  Maybe the hand of civilization had marked  both parakeet and pigeon so deeply that they were more alike than disalike, and in each other they found a reflection of themselves that cast back truer for the void.

Eventually, even the people could grew to see it.  ”An parakeet escaped a few years ago,” they’d say watching the birds fly by.  ”We tried to catch her, but she’s one of the pigeons now.”

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