These past few weeks, I've been taking care of a friend's bird. He's not much to look at (the bird, that is), but I've become very attached to him. At least I think he's a he. I tried laying him on his back and opening his scrawny legs, but could find nothing of any consequence down there. In the end, I settled on he, primarily because I'm more comfortable belching in the presence of another male. The bird seems happy with this arrangement. Sometimes I wonder what he would think of beer.

The bird is a society finch -- a tiny member of the Fringillidae family -- and he has no name. My friend never gave him one, which is weird, I think. Then again, what do you call a society finch? Hawk-Eye? Too butch. Proust? Too intellectual. Finchy? Too dumb. After much trial and error (the bird shuddered when I called him "Simon"), I decided on the Boy -- as in, "I have to go home and feed the Boy; I think he's starving to death."

In fact, the Boy isn't starving to death. Far from it. The other day, down to my last five bucks, I bought him a package of celery sticks for $2.99. He likes celery. But not as much as he likes millet -- those little bushels of seed you can buy at the pet store. The Boy loves millet. It's like OxyContin to him. I'm his pusher. Every day I give the Boy enough millet to send a flock of ostriches into spasms of ecstasy. And when I feed him, I always say the same thing. I say: "Bon appatweet." He's getting to be too fat for his legs.

I overfeed the Boy because I feel guilty. The way he looks at me when I get home at night, the husks of millet flecking his tiny beak, just breaks my heart. It's the cage thing, I think. Even though the specially bred society finch has never lived in -- or even visited -- the wild (as a Web site dedicated to the bird puts it, "It is a completely manmade finch"), the Boy's useless little wings make me very sad. Recently, I decided to give him the freedom of my apartment. I opened the cage door. "Go!" I said, flapping my arms. "Go!" He just sat there looking at me. Then he took a crap and returned to his seed. He has a bird brain. He doesn't understand.

The Boy has a good many habits that suggest a less-than-stellar intellect. He poos in his water trough. He sleeps in his food tray. He flutters up into the corner of his cage and bangs his head. Every time I put a piece of celery through the bars of his cage, the Boy skitters, terrified, to the opposite end of his perch, where he will regard the intruding vegetable for a while before daring to go peck it. Often, he will sit for hours doing nothing but staring off into space. At such times, he seems very French to me.

Sometimes, I imagine taking the Boy to bed with me, tucking the blankets up under his little chin, kissing his tiny forehead. (Okay, finches don't have chins, or foreheads for that matter, but you get the picture.) All night long, the Boy would have incredibly vivid dreams -- of soaring high above the Grand Canyon, or snagging rabbits with his powerful talons -- and all night long he'd be tossing and tweeting, twittering and turning. Then he'd start to snore. It wouldn't be loud -- just a faint t-t-t-t-t -- but it would start to piss me off. I'd try pinching his beak, but that wouldn't help. In the end, I'd send him back to his cage.

To be honest, I do lose sleep over the Boy. When I'm away, I lie awake at night fretting about him. What if he chokes on a seed and I'm not there to give him the Heimlich? What if the heat goes off and he freezes to death? Also, the Boy and his ilk are notorious for dropping dead at the slightest malodor (the father of a friend of mine lost his pet bird to some rotting potatoes). What if the Boy is overcome by fumes from the gas stove or the paint on the radiators? Jesus, the sock heap!

And when I stay at home, the Boy wakes me up every morning, six o'clock sharp, with what might loosely be termed singing. My boy doesn't chirpy-cheep in a "hello, dawn" kind of way; he screeches and squawks as if he were being eaten by a pack of rats. The first time it happened, I ran into the living room brandishing a shoe, determined to come to his defense. These days, I still run into the living room brandishing a shoe, only now I am determined to bash his little head in. Which, of course, I do not do.

Despite his many peccadilloes, I have grown fond of the Boy. He has brought out my long-suppressed paternal instincts. I yearn for the day we might play touch football together in the park. Perhaps I could take him camping in Vermont, where I would talk to him about important things like religion and girls. But this will never happen. Pretty soon my friend will come back, and then the Boy will be gone. Sometimes I think he senses this, too -- those beady, millet-size eyes of his look up at me as if to say, "Daddy?"

But he is tougher than I've given him credit for. When things start to get too maudlin, the Boy and I will wrestle for a while. I'll give him noogies and he'll peck at my eyeballs in a playful way. Then, exhausted, we'll fall back on the living-room rug and stare at the ceiling and make believe it isn't there, that all we have to do is to spread our wings and we'll take flight, swooping and looping in a gambado of joy, the earth and all its troubles receding. There will be no cages up there, no cubicles -- just the Boy and me and the warm sun and a clear, endless blue sky opening up before us.

Chris Wright is accepting donations of millet and celery on behalf of the Boy. He can be reached at cwright[a]phx.com.

Issue Date: May 10 - 16, 2002