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it probably only eats oatmeal.”
    The cockatiel deal sounded good. And by the time we drove across the Grand River to find a secluded house in the woods guarded by the only ferocious Saint Bernard on the planet—“Stay in the car until I get a chain on him,” the husband recommendedas the beast raked my windshield with its massive forepaws—the Quaker parakeet had already been taken off the market.
    “Our son doesn’t want us to sell his bird,” said the wife, and sure enough, a pudgy-faced boy glowered at us as if we were set on shooting his dog in the bargain. Near him hunkered the Quaker, a pudgy-faced, robin-size, green bird that glowered at us as if we were set on packing up the boy.
    In an effort to make sure we would prefer their cockatiel to the verboten Quaker, the husband had already trimmed her flight feathers for us. But he had badly botched the job by cutting them far too short. Whenever the addled creature flapped her wings, she spattered the eggshell-colored wall nearest her cage with cockatiel blood.
    “I don’t think she’s bleeding anymore,” the chagrined wife informed us as we backed out of their living room, our senses on alert for the return of the Volvo-size Saint Bernard. “We sprinkled flour on her feathers,” she added, citing that well-known coagulating trick favored by ambulance drivers and emergency room physicians around the world.
    Though the experience unnerved us, we still came away favoring a cockatiel, and I bought a cage in anticipation. Unfortunately, when we brought the cage to the Jonah’s Ark, a local pet shop specializing in birds, it became clear that it was too small for a cock-atiel. A cockatiel would have been able to sit in the cage but wouldn’t have had the room to turn around without catching its tail between the bars. Plus, the cockatiels in the store struck us as disappointingly parakeet-like, as if someone had taken a common yellow budgie, added a crest and drawn-out tail, and applied a little orange rouge to the cheeks. But sensing that we were in purchasing mode, the clerk, Joyce, plucked a Quaker parakeet from aPlexiglas display area and placed it on Linda’s finger. In contrast to the other Quaker we had seen, this one was lively and handsome, causing my hand to migrate toward my checkbook. But the bird was about the same size as a cockatiel and wouldn’t fit our cage. Joyce’s admonition unnerved us, too.
    “Don’t let him get hold of your fingernail. He’ll think it’s a nut and try to crack it.”
    Duly warned, I buried my hands in my pockets as Linda and I walked up and down the aisles in search of an alternative to the cockatiel and the Quaker. In our flush to buy a bird, we didn’t stop to question why the inventory was depleted. The first time we had visited Jonah’s, the store was atwitter with all manner of birds. This time, however, most of the cages were empty except for a pair of menacing macaws that growled if we approached them, a sleepy-eyed cockatoo that barely noticed us, and a wild-caught, wild-eyed Senegal parrot that had mangled a clerk’s forearm our last time in the store. In an isolated cage near the cash register, the prettiest of the few birds scaled to fit our cage hung upside-down from the bars. He was a stubby-tailed, parakeet-size, animated fellow endowed with every possible hue of green and wearing a brilliant patch of orange just beneath his beak.
    “What kind of bird is he?” Linda asked the clerk.
    “You can take him out of the cage,” she replied brightly, bypassing the question. Then a cloud passed over her expression as if she had just remembered a troubling event from her childhood. “I’ll get him for you,” she offered, turning her back to block the cage-to-finger transaction from our view. Before passing the bird to Linda, she cautioned, “Now, he might use his beak to climb onto your hand, but don’t worry, he’s not trying to bite you. He’s just keeping his balance.”
    True to Joyce’s