Last August, my friends Mike and Mary showed up at my birthday party with a package that had to be urgently opened. Thinking it might be a bottle of chilled champagne or a bucket of Ben & Jerry’s, I opened the gift bag to find a shell-shocked yellow and green parakeet staring back at me. Within a day, I had named him Maxwell because he reminded me of Don Adam’s character on “Get Smart.”
In October, Maxwell started falling off his perch at night, waking me at two in the morning with loud squawking and flapping wings. When I consulted the vet, she informed me that parakeets are social birds and this was a sign of depression. The following weekend, a surprisingly warm Halloween weekend, I made a trip to the pet store and bought a lady bird to keep Maxwell company.
When I introduced Agent 99 to Maxwell, she wanted nothing to do with him; but he was very excited to have company. If he was a peacock instead of a parakeet, he would have been strutting around her in circles with his tail fanned. In observation, I noticed, however, that Maxwell was not willing to give up his favorite perch or make room for 99 in his cage. He was, after all, there first.
Over the next few weeks, they began to act like horny teenagers: whenever I would come in the room or flick on the light, they would move to opposite sides of the cage.
Today, they’ve become little love birds. Maxwell waits for 99 to eat before he has dinner. They give each other kisses (as best as birds can at least). Sometimes they fight. Mostly, they’ve become an old married couple of birds in a three month time frame.
And me, the pet owner, the voyeur in this marriage, set them up. I am a bird matchmaker.
Sometimes in this complicated world of wars, politics, diseases and random violence, I look at Maxwell and 99 and envy them to some small extent.
My life would be more simplistic if at birth my parents had arranged a marriage for me. Then, whenever my betrothed and I would meet, we would have propriety and social decencies to keep us in check. I wouldn’t have to worry about being bored by the dating scene. Or unreturned phone calls. Or the effects of sex on the first date.
I just read Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” for the third time in my adult life. Elizabeth and her sisters’ lives revolved around marriage. And even within the confines of the social decencies that meant courting men and women had to tiptoe around, they managed to woo and say a lot without being crass or vulgar or disgusting or indecent or pushy.
Arranged marriages, social propriety – it all sounds so very idealistic: the fun of dating without the emotional distress; love without loss.
However, I then snap back to reality: if my only duty were to marry, my life wouldn’t be what I want it to be. I’d have few adventures to speak of, no glass ceiling to break through, and a much different take on things. And in this reality, I appreciate that things are complicated and tough. I certainly appreciate my freedom of choice. And one marriage – the marriage of two parakeets – is the only arranged marriage I want in my daily life. Proof that what works for some might not work for all.
