If You Can't Join 'Em, Cuss 'Em Out! (Another Budgie Story)
by Tina Blue
December 25, 2000
When I was a young girl, I used to try to catch wild birds. They fascinated me, and I wanted one desperately. I was always on the lookout for a bird I could catch.
One day, when I was eleven, I was hiding out under a bush in a neighbor's yard. To the side, I caught a glimpse of something bright blue moving nearby. A bird! I was too excited to look very closely. I just quickly put my finger down. To my amazement, instead of flying away the bird hopped right aboard! That was when I realized that I had caught not a bluejay, but someone's escaped pet budgie (what some of you would call a parakeet).
Carefully I made my way home, holding the bird out in front of me, scared to death that he might startle and fly away after all. When I got home, everyone gathered around. We had frequently had budgies in the past, so Mom wasn't even slightly fazed at the idea of adopting this little beauty.
We still had the cage and toys from our last budgie, Jo, who had died perhaps a year earlier. This new one was male, so we named him "Joe," after her.
Joe was a lot of fun. Whoever had owned him before must have cursed up a storm, because Joe had quite a range of rude language to draw on. He seemed to know when to use it, too, since he saved the swearing for those times when he wanted to express annoyance or frustration, dropping his voice to a gutteral mutter to do so.
When the old Andy Griffith Show would come on, Joe liked to sit on my father's shoulder to watch. His favorite part, of course, was the whistling sequence that ran over the show's opening credits. Joe would do his best to whistle along, but he never could make it all the way to the end without messing up.
That's when he would dip into his vocabulary of cuss words. It really annoyed him that he couldn't whistle the whole Andy Griffith theme song, and he had quite a lot to say about that--none of it printable!
Budgies are winning little devils. I'd love to have another one--but I'm afraid my three cats and my ferret would love it even more.
