Contemplating things I prefer to ignore.

Reading: Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose. It's amazing

Moving: weights

Watching: thunderheads, lightning, and rain

Listening: thunder and Des'ree. "You Gotta Be" from I Ain't Moving has been my pick-me-up song for five years now.

12 July 2001: Timshel

A while back Blake discovered that he liked to climb up the bath towels, which he could reach from the vanity. There are two double hooks to the left of the vanity, and RDC keeps his towel on the left one and I keep my two, body and hair, on the right. Blake would lean way out, grab a fold of towel in his beak, and launch, scrabbling for footholds in the terrycloth, and climb up. Once up, he would sit happily and preen and watch you shower or braid your hair or whatever. Preening, he litters his surroundings with bits of feather and keratin. Also poop. So, since I live to serve the demanding little beast I molded, I moved my towels to the third hook on the back of the bathroom door, leaving an old, decoy towel--a spare cage-cover and already buddified--for him to climb and mess up. The problem with an old towel is that it doesn't have much shag left to it, and the loops in the terrycloth are what makes it easy to climb a towel. So he would use the old towel only to swing across to the next towel--RDC's newer, terryclothier, clean one. Also as soon as the pool opened, I wanted that third hook at the back of the door for my goggles, swimsuit, and beach towel (the other two are for our bathrobes).

Haitch was describing someone's abode as a nice new house but with telling scattered remnants of grad school starvation here and there. "Like they don't--" and she stopped herself.
"They don't what?"
"Well, I was going to say, they don't have any matching towels."

Oh. And we laughed together.

Yup, that's me too. I don't own a single bath towel I wasn't given. And the gifts tend to come in pairs rather than sets with--sticking with the china theme from the last entry--dinner, lunch, and salad plate sizes. So any two bath towels might match but not have coordinating washcloths. Riding in Haitch's backseat recently, I peeped into an overstuffed Bloodbath and Beyond bag. In it was the complete set of towels with which she outfitted her bathroom in the new apartment. She had bought herself all new towels and was going to give these to Goodwill. "Could I buy them off you? Or donate something to Goodwill in lieu of them?"

My sister was horrified at the idea of my desiring pre-owned towels. They were Haitch-used towels, not scary in my book. I wouldn't buy any from a yard sale. Whatever. This is not something I get squicked about.

They were lavender, sage green, and yellow. They were cheerful. They matched my upstairs paint colors. They matched each other. We wouldn't run out of towels during the aunt and uncle's visit, as we did during another three-person visit last summer.

With a great deal of pleasure, I hung a set of the new-to-me towels in our bathroom and still had a matched pair of big, blue thirsty towels downstairs for our visitors. I folded the rest into our puny, shallow linen closet (three shelves in a hall cabinet, maybe six inches deep and less than two feet long--another reason I haven't accumulated many). I felt as satisfied as the Marches as they outfitted Meg's linen closet. (Now all I needed was fingerbowls.)

Later that day, I brushed my teeth. As usual, I had Blake on my shoulder, because not only is he usually on my shoulder but also beak-brushing is an extremely fun thing. You can bob your head with the back-and-forth of the brush and make sh-sh-sh brushing sounds and get frightened when the dental floss comes off the reel but bob your head again when the floss saws back and forth and you can make your little growling noise when your daddy gargles and best of all you can try, vainly but valiantly, to get your beak in someone's mouth because mint is the best flavor ever (and therefore Altoids are the most intriguing food you're never allowed to have).

Blake didn't want to participate in the beak-brushing this time. Sometimes he likes to go into the medicine cabinet because it is faintly like a cave and there are boxes to gnaw (just now the cabinet is off-limits because we've given him all the boxes and now the medications are stacked on the shelves in their foil, too dangerous for a buddy). But he didn't want to go into the cabinet. He wanted the towels. He wanted the towels very much. He wanted the towels Right Now. Now, damn it!

Blake doesn't fly. Blake wanting to go somewhere is Blake flattened, keelbone pressed down against your finger or shoulder or wherever he's perched, stubby wings out. I cater to his every whim, and when he begged for the hand towel that hangs above the sink to one side, I thought fine, whatever, and put him on it. That's where he sits to watch and sing to RDC while he shaves. It's a common buddy perch.

He didn't merely prefer the handtowel hook to my shoulder. He preferred the hand towel itself. Soon we discovered he loved the bath towels too, violently. Not the lavender ones but the green and yellow ones, absolutely. Not as violently as he loves the napkins, but badly enough. Badly enough that from a human shoulder in the dining room, he would flutter down and prance into the bathroom and stand under them, gazing upward adoringly and getting extremely protective of them and vicious toward any human who wanted, say, to get him off the floor where dangerous feet are.

Blake did that when the aunt and uncle were here. RDC closed the bathroom door to keep him out, but Blake just fluttered back to pace back and forth in front of the door. Finally RDC removed and hid the towels and left the door open for Blake to see that the objects of his affection were gone, after which he calmed somewhat. The uncle had never expected Blake to be smart enough to have object permanency. I say he might have enough clue to recognize that Sexy Towels Live in the Bathroom, but if he had a real notion of object permanency, he would realize that their disappearance meant only that Daddy Hid Them, not that They're Lost and Gone Forever Dreadful Sorry.

We have an extremely spoiled bird.

We deprive him of flight, so letting him climb and dirty a decoy towel doesn't seem like too much to allow him. Nor have we provided him with a mate, but we don't enable his hormonal rages. We hide the napkins on the seat of a chair under the table between meals, easy enough. If he can't see them, soon enough he forgets they exist. However, we're not going chuck damp towels in some out of the way corner between every use because of his hormones. Fun we enable; lust, because it's accompanied by territorialism and snapping, we don't.

What I am going to have to do is sneak my cockatiel into every store I frequent, testing table linens and bathtowels on him. I hope I can find something that I like that he doesn't. One day, after we--RDC and I--redo that bathroom, I am going to outfit it with all matching towels (and bathmat, ooo!), and I don't want Blake's appetites dictating my design scheme.

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It has been so unusually damp in Denver that our cookies--the Wild Oats non-hydrogenated fat version of Oreos--have gone, as Lee describes his tarts, "soaky." But, like Cal, I like them soaky.