Broke My Heart

"All my life I wanted a dog. After all, I was an only child. To a child without neighborhood friends, without sisters who could become eternal confidantes, without brothers as co-conspirators in life, a dog was the only obvious substitute for companionship. Or at least it was obvious to me. It was not at all obvious to my mother.

Our house, my mother insisted, was not the kind of place where dogs belonged—a walk-up in a northern city given to lake-effect snowstorms. And furthermore, the landlord agreed with her. But my mother could deal with the idea of my having a bird.

On Good Friday, Billy, a blue parakeet, became the Easter gift of my life. Nothing has ever quite matched it since. I couldn’t take a bird for a walk, of course, as I had seen so many children my age do with their dogs. And we couldn’t play ball together. But, on the other hand, I learned that having a bird meant having a companion where the interaction was more intense than it was with a dog. Dogs, at least to some extent, had a life of their own.

Billy’s whole life, on the other hand—every drop of water, every bite of food, every ounce of attention, every bit of play—depended on me. It was an amazingly warm and personal thought. It grew me up in ways I could never have expected. “Joan,” my mother said, “you taught that bird to eat out of your hand. Now you get home here and feed it.”

So, I quit the swimming lessons that were not half as important to me as Billy was, and did. Billy became my playmate, my ally, my first guide into the depth and meaning of the animal-human bond. Billy came and filled my empty hours, learned to talk to me a little, flew to my finger when I called her off the curtain rods, woke me in the morning—and then, several years later, simply disappeared one day. And broke my heart.

No one knew how it had happened or where she’d gone. I only knew that, at the age of thirteen, I had lost something irreplaceable."
-- Joan Chittister, Two Dogs and a Parrot