• Posted By panthergirl @ 8:06 PM • • •
Monday, January 31, 2011
The Best Snowstorm Story I've Got
When we lived in Brooklyn in the mid 90s, we had two parakeets: Guido and Rudy. Although a parakeet and not a parrot, Rudy could talk and it was pretty hilarious. He'd say things like "Lemme out, goddamit!" and "Beam me up, Scotty!". If one of us had a bad cold we'd suddenly hear Rudy "coughing".
One fateful morning we approached the cage and Rudy was puffed up like a big snowball (this isn't the snow-part of the story. Bear with me.) Below him lay Guido, dead as a doornail. Emma, age 9, was devastated (but at least she didn't have to spend the night with the corpse like Rudy had). She put Guido in a little box, took him out to the backyard of our brownstone and buried him. Then she sent him a postcard, addressed to "Quido, Heaven." (She could never pronouce "Guido". Some Italian SHE is!)
A few months later, Rudy was acting strange. My husband Tony took him out of the cage and instead of flying around, he walked on the kitchen table like someone failing a sobriety test. Seeing his distress, Tony cradled him and the bird died in his hand. Very sad. Emma, of course, wanted to bury Rudy right next to Guido, but this was 1994 and there was about 3 feet of snow in the yard. What to do...what to do...
Tony got some plastic wrap and wound it around the stiff little body of Rudy, and put him in the freezer to keep him preserved. Every time the snow was about to melt, we got slammed with another storm. We knew that Rudy's burial would have to be postponed until Spring.
In May, I found out I was pregnant and we made plans to move from Brooklyn to Connecticut in July, to be closer to my job.
A few weeks after the move, I bolted upright in bed one night and yelled: "RUDY!!!!" Yep...we had moved out of that house leaving a Rudy-sicle in the freezer for the new tenants. After the initial horror, we could not stop laughing. (And now I imagine this is a story another family tells as well!)
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