Tribute to a fine fluff of feathers

I went to refill my bird's food dish the other day and found her dead in the bottom of the cage...it seems that she became panicked in the night, which she sometimes did, and flailed around in her cage and broke her neck against the bars. Sad. My little nacho whore, little noisemaker, sweetly picky snuggler against fingertips and shirts, tormenter of dogs, early-morning squawker, lampshade-percher, beer bottle knocker-overer birdie.

I could never get a good photo of her, and earlier this week, I had *finally* managed to. She was perched on the lampshade in the living room, lit from below and cocking her head and looking at me in that "please give me a neckrub" way. I took twenty or so pictures, and one came out well.

I miss her little sounds. My kitchen seems colder and darker without her living on top of the fridge. I put a small TV up there, but it's surely not the same.

Last night I dreamed my brother shot a squirrel with a slingshot. I was looking at the squirrel's eye as it sat in the cherry tree in the backyard of my parents' neighbor's house. My brother pulled the band back and released the pellet. I saw the squirrel's eye grow wider for just a moment and then watched it fall from the tree, limp, for my brother's dog to devour. The squirrel was pregnant and the dog ate the fetuses too. I moved away from watching it, to take pictures of tulips, but there was so much pollen on my lense that all my pictures looked full of noise. I was trying to wipe the lense off when my alarm went off this morning.

On the bus, on the way to work, I became so wrapped up in a fantasy of all the things I'd take pictures of if I were invisible that I almost missed my stop downtown. Luckily, an elderly woman had pulled the "stop request" cord and the driver stopped on the corner where I needed to get off. The old woman had nearly gotten through the laborious process of getting off the bus before I realized where we were and hurried to stand up and run down the aisle and get off the bus. I heard the four Hindi men sitting around me laugh as I rushed.

Last night M and I watched "Born into Brothels," a documentary about the children of sex workers who live in the red-light district of Calcutta and the English woman who tries to teach them photography. It was very, very good, and at several times I had tears running down my face at the stark beauty and realism. I've read a lot of fiction set in India, A Fine Balance being one of my favorite books, and though you get visuals in your head of what destitute urban areas of a severely overpopulated region of the world might look like, you don't really fully understand the total claustrophobic overwhelmingness of it. Some of the documentary was actually filmed by the children it is about. The children are beyond poor, and the woman takes them to the zoo and to the beach. The scene where they go to the beach is amazing; they've obviously never been, and the sounds they make when they see the water stretching out in front of them had saltwater of a different kind coming out my eyes.

Anyway. Highly recommend it.

Weekend plans: go with mother and wheelchair-bound grandmother to a local mall; take pictures. Learn more PhotoShop. Get decent ski goggles and facemask for next weekend. Call that dude about the calendar. Play with Ruby and the other doggies.