I'm sitting on the deck with the parrot. I'm rereading The Third Rumpole Omnibus. He's eating his half of a fortune cookie. (His fortune: "EXPRESS YOURSELF. DO SOMETHING CREATIVE.")
Traditionally, he hears it before I do, but this time I heard it first: Geese, heading south, in formation. I look at the parrot. The parrot looks at me.
What most people think of as a parrot's shoulders are actually his wrists. He shrugs his wrists at me.
"I can live with the rain, and I suppose I don't really mind it getting colder. But I wish it didn't have to get dark so early."
I could only nod in agreement. Tonight it'll be dark by a little after seven. In ten weeks it'll be dark at around four thirty. Both of us need the sunlight more, the older we get. I suggest we're like an old Simon and Garfunkel tune. He gives me the parrot equivalent of the fish eye.
Two nonmigratory bipeds, separated by over seventy million years of evolution, both waiting for April.
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