Honey Bear

June 1967

I’ve left Kentucky only once. After I’d imprinted on Jonah and dropped the last of my downy fledgling feathers, I was passably house-trained enough for a vacation. The destination was Mission Beach in San Diego, where we drove as a family: Ma and Pa and Jonah and me in a traveling cage, which Ma was very careful to call an ‘atrium’. On the drive, I tried to minimize my chatter because Pa—a man I remember chiefly as large and covered in black hairs, with a voice like a rockslide—did not care for chatter. Sly Jonah used this fact to his advantage and trained a new phrase into me for weeks beforehand. As the family ignored each other as best they could in the cramped cabin of the family wagon, Jonah poked me through the bars of the ‘atrium’. I took this as my cue.

“Are we there yet?” I squawked.

“Are we there-yet? Are-we there yet? Are-we-there-yet?” I bobbed my head to my own rhythm.

Ma snorted out of her half-sleep and turned to the back seat, squinty-eyed. Pa white-knuckled the wheel and Jonah pinched his lips together to keep the laughter from squirting out.

I glowed with the attention.

“Are we there yet!” I trilled, tapping the bars of the ‘atrium’ for good measure.

“F’CHRISSAKES!” Pa slammed his fist against the wheel and we lurched into the left lane, narrowly missing a semi-truck coming head-on. “Jonah, you varmint, you taught ‘im that, din’t ya? DIN’T YA?!”

Jonah damn near burst a kidney, he laughed so hard. Even Ma giggled a bit, her eyes never leaving the needlepoint in her lap. I could tell Pa wanted to pull over and teach Jonah a proper lesson, but the prospect of adding even one minute to the drive kept him on the road.

We did finally make it to San Diego, where Jonah immediately raced down to the body-crammed sand of Mission Beach and straight into the waves, but rushed back to take me out of my cage—err, atrium. I perched smartly on his shoulder, and together we made our way through the throngs of gawkers, down to the edge of the water, where Ma snapped polaroids of us. The sun was drooping low in the sky and the ocean was an ultraviolet plane of oscillations. Something in me recognized the fishy, salt-heavy smell of sea and I was seized by an urge to take off and disappear into the horizon, to let the knowing wind blow me back to the land of my birth. But Jonah was my best friend, then and now, so I kept my talons wrapped gently around his safe shoulder. He reached up to stroke my breast plumage with his knuckles.

I remember the first night I met Maya. It was in Jonah’s boyhood room, on Hunters Street in Kentucky, but my cage was the same as it is now. The room was illuminated only by the glow of the night light in the hallway. Two bodies came creeping up the stairway, tiptoeing down the hall and closing the bedroom door behind them. I heard whispers and muted giggling. Then Jonah clicked on the bedside lamp, and a pale light revealed two teenagers in the throes of secrecy: Jonah with his long hair more disheveled than usual, and a small, pale and bony girl with bouncing brown curls. Jonah put a finger to his lips and the girl sat down on the edge of his bed. She hooked her fingers underneath her shirt and slowly pulled it over her head, letting it fall to the already cluttered floor. I noted she was trembling. Jonah rubbed his forehead like he couldn’t believe what was happening. I felt it appropriate to remind him of my presence—I’d yet to be fed, and even the thought of bland kibble made my stomach yearn.

“Tie your shoes!” I shrieked from the wooden platform perch. I pressed my beak through the bars. “Tie your shoes!” This phrase was a favorite of Ma’s; I didn’t know what it meant, but it always elicited some strong response from Jonah.

Upon hearing another’s voice in the room, the girl screamed and lunged for her shirt. Jonah tried to calm her down by pointing to me and my cage, but she pushed him away with unexpected vigor, threw open the door, and sprinted down the staircase. Ma’s light flicked on from down the hall; still groggy with sleep, she sprung into view and cut Jonah off at the top of the stairs before he could follow the girl. The whole house shook with the force of the front door slamming. Ma snagged Jonah by the wrist with one giant, doughy hand, one finger still bearing the ring she couldn’t bring herself to take off.

Ma was not a yeller, but the soft, burning disappointment in her voice was worse. After she’d finished with Jonah, he trudged back to his room, drooping as much with exhaustion as with shame.

I’d only picked up a few of Ma’s words.

“No son of mine,” I cooed softly. “No son of mine.” I’m hungry, Jonah, so hungry!

Jonah lay on his side in his bed, silent. I noticed his arms wrapped around his shoulders and his chest jolting up and down. I stopped talking.

Despite her rocky maiden visit to the Domack household, Maya would become a fixture in Jonah’s bedroom—sometimes at night, with their clothing in piles around the bed, and sometimes during the day, when they would watch television and listen to Maya’s records. They were thrilled when I chimed along: “Cum-on feel-the-noise! Wild-wild-wild! Wild! Wild! Wild!”

At first, I was wary of Maya, as I associated her with hunger and not being fed. Gradually, she wore down my resistance. It was Maya who would suggest to Jonah that he take me out of the cage and let me zoom around the house. She would stroke my feathers, murmuring, “Who’s a pretty bird? Lolly’s a pretty bird!” and, delighted, present me to Jonah: “Look what Lolly can do! Tell him, Lolly!” to which I obliged: “Lolly pretty bird. Lolly pretty bird. Lolly pretty bird!”

Our first move was shocking, though it was apparent that Jonah had outgrown his bedroom at Ma’s house, physically and otherwise. He coaxed me into a traveling cage—the same ‘atrium’ in which I’d made the trip to Mission Beach—and draped a blanket around the bars that he did not take off until I arrived, after much grievous and blind jostling, in a new room with a larger bed. Jonah settled my cage into the nook where it would rest for the next thirty years.

Maya shared this new bed with Jonah, and from her near-constant presence in the house, I knew she’d joined my family for good. It appeared that with Maya installed at Jonah’s side, Ma was out of the flock. She visited infrequently, and when she did, I rarely received more than a friendly wave from the bedroom door.

Some subtle, irrepressible change was happening in Maya. She began to toss and turn at night, keeping me awake while Jonah, always a heavy sleeper, snored comfortably in the writhing sea of blankets. She lurched into the bathroom at the first crack of dawn and remained there for an eternity. One afternoon, she slipped half a banana and a handful of popcorn through the bars and winked at me.

“You can keep a secret, right Lolly?”

I bobbed my head enthusiastically; I certainly could.

She lifted her shirt to the bottom of her breasts. At first, it just looked like her bare stomach. Then, I noticed the small bulge that defined her lower abdomen.

“Shhh,” she whispered, holding a finger to her lips.

Later that evening, Jonah returned, clomping upstairs with his work boots on. He threw his cap unto the dresser and wiped his hands on his jeans. Maya emerged from the bathroom, steam pouring out in great gossamer wafts behind her. She had a towel wrapped around her body, and when Jonah reached for it, she swatted his hand away. I whistled happily from my perch, interrupting their game.

Chuckling, Jonah pressed his thumb to the bars and I nudged it with my beak.

“He doesn’t want to touch your greasy hands!” Maya exclaimed.

I bobbed my head enthusiastically.

“Secret!” I whistled. “Secret. Secret. Secret.”

Jonah let his thumb drift to his side. He turned to face Maya, who looked small and uncertain.

“Secret?” Jonah asked.

Maya hesitated, then let the towel fall. She cupped her hands around her belly, the thumbs meeting above her navel. Jonah’s own hands went instantly to his forehead before he uttered a single high-pitched gasp. It was an expression, I saw immediately, of surprise, as surprise in the same moment crumbles into love. He pulled Maya to her feet, into an embrace, and fell to his knees to deliver kisses to the bulge in her stomach. I didn’t understand what was happening, of course, but I would later understand that this was the very moment that Honey Bear changed all our lives.

Elise Wiggs-Domack joined our flock less than a year later. She was shorter than me, but already heavier, and I was overwhelmed by her complex vocalizations. She talked to me in a way no human ever had: endlessly, sometimes in trickles, others in torrents.

“Gabaga oop pa bagaaaaaa!” she would babble.

“Oop pa baga!” I would respond.

And on we would go.

I spent more time out of the cage than I ever had, clambering over the furniture with Elise as we learned our way around a house that was new to us both. Sometimes, as she lay belly-up on the carpet, pedaling her limbs, I would flap my own wings over her head: an indoor rainbow for my Elise. She struggled with certain consonants, and so gave me a nickname: “Wah-wee”. Maya gave Elise her nickname because she was sweet and cuddly: Honey Bear.

It was the happiest time of my life. In some deep recess of my heart, I ached for the things I’d never known: the white sand of my birthright and voices like my own floating through a canopy. But in the depth of my bond with Honey Bear and her love for me, I had cemented my place in the flock. Honey Bear’s scribbles seldom featured anything but a likeness of me, and she was generous in her renderings; sometimes my tail feathers were purple, pink, and sparkly. The whole family danced to Maya’s old records when Jonah had energy left after work. I perched on a barstool, bobbing my head and shuffling my feet, imbibing the rhythms. Honey Bear danced like only a five year-old human could, punching her little fists in the air and spinning until she made herself dizzy.

Gradually, Jonah had less and less energy left for dancing after work, until he had none at all. He came home and fed me, then expected Maya to feed him. I never complained about my meals; he increasingly found fault with his. He made sure to close the bedroom door quietly, so as not to disturb Honey Bear down the hall, when he wanted to argue with Maya; he was a considerate arguer. He even spoke low so that I couldn’t hear. I didn’t understand, but I heard. Maya heard too; she kept her face neutral and slack, which was the opposite of what Jonah wanted. He would turn off the light and roll into bed, leaving Maya standing there, dead-faced, in the darkness.

Jonah began to forget to feed me, so Maya would push sliced mango and cashews through the bars. At home alone all day, she took to singing loudly, off-key and unsure, as she wandered the rooms.

Honey Bear was ever my adoring companion, but she’d grown up into an eight year-old with less time for worn pets than for new toys. She loved slime above all, and delighted in mixing kitchen ingredients to form fluorescent gobs of jiggling goop. Sometimes she extended her homespun blobs towards me, and I’d give them an experimental peck. I didn’t see the appeal.

On one summer night, as Jonah was closing the bedroom door and settling in for the usual argument, Maya surprised him. She was holding a pillow and sleeping bag. She gazed at him silently, then stepped past him and padded down the hall towards the staircase. Jonah was lost; he wiped his greasy hands on his work pants and sat on the edge of the bed for a long time. Finally, he turned out the lights and went to bed.

Maya never slept beside him in the bed again.

I was fed with increasing irregularity, and usually by Honey Bear with snacks she’d brought home from school. I subsisted on cookie crumbles, apple cores, and chips. Jonah began to return later and later each evening, and when he got home, he fell straight into the bed like a traveler at journey’s end. Maya entered the bedroom only to vacuum and shower, and soon she stopped vacuuming. It was in these days, when she snuck in and out of the bathroom like a fugitive, that I noticed the startling accentuation of her bony frame and the compounded lines by her eyes. After one shower, she stopped to stroke my feathers and murmured, “Hi, Lolly.”

“Honey bear,” I told her. “Honey bear. Honey bear.”

“Honey bear’s at school, Lolly,” she whispered, and then she was gone, the faint scent of her shampoo lingering.

I was roused late in the night by a pair of delicate hands guiding me from the cage. They were Maya’s hands; she arranged me on her knuckle and closed her fingers around my toes. From the untouched bed, I could tell Jonah had not yet come home. Holding me out in front of her, Maya cut through the darkness in the hallway, regal as a ship and I, the figurehead. Downstairs, we slid through the kitchen doorway and out into the cool, humid air of the Kentucky summer, the cicadas wailing in unison. Maya padded across the lawn to the fence that separated our property from the city park and the reservoir. She unfurled her fingers and moved my feet onto her palms, then extended her arms so that from my perch I could see everything the moonlight illuminated: the sleeping ducks on the reservoir, the thick snarl of trees that lined the nearest sidewalk, and the unbroken line of forest on the far shore.

“Be free, Lolly,” Maya whispered. Her arms strained as she pushed me still higher. “Fly away, Lolly.”

I didn’t move. How could I? This was home. This was flock, nest, Honey Bear.

“Fly away from here! Be free, Lolly! Freedom! Fly away!” she choked, desperate now.

In the full crowns of the distant beech trees, I could imagine a whole jungle of scarlet macaws, beaks tucked under wings, sleeping. But...Honey Bear. I looked down at Maya, trying to tell her.

Maya collapsed to the lawn, and I had to flap vigorously to keep from tumbling with her. She lay in the moonlit grass, sobbing.

I fluttered down to land beside her leg. “Be free.” I told her. “Fly away. Be free.”

She sobbed harder.

“Honey bear,” I reminded her.

She put her face in her hands. I nuzzled her with my beak, and we stayed in the yard like that for a long time.

After Maya moved out and took Honey Bear with her, the hues of my life lost their intensity, like a painting mired too long in dust.

It had been years since Jonah himself had drawn me from the cage, but it was his thick, doughy arm (he took after Ma) that reached now through the gate. He was red-faced and his eyes were wet crescents. I perched on the forearm of his hoodie, a warm and familiar spot, and tried to tell him through my left eye, which faced him, that I understood. I am so sorry! I wanted to squawk at him, but since no one had ever apologized to anyone else in that house, I did not have the right words. All he saw was one beady eye, black as coal and ringed with watery yellow.

“Honey bear?” I ventured cautiously. “Honey bear? Honey bear?”

Jonah shut his eyes and turned away from me. He gently maneuvered me into the cage and latched the door.

After that, we were quiet with each other, each blaming the other in some part for what had happened. I took to seizing the shafts of my neck feathers and ripping them free, one by one. For every time Jonah failed to notice my self-mutilation, I ripped out another.

After enough time had passed, it was like we’d been caged so long, we’d lost the ability to fly.

Honey Bear visited her dad every other week, and each time, she would pull me from my cage and stroke me and speak to me in a soothing murmur, not unlike her baby babble. But her visits were short, and Jonah wanted to spend as much time as possible with Honey Bear. When she entered high school, Maya moved them to California, and I saw my Honey Bear only superficially, once or twice a year.

The vet proclaimed me a healthy parrot, and praised my longevity; Jonah was the opposite—he aged three decades in just one, and by the time he entered his sixties, he was an old man. He’d lost touch with Honey Bear years ago. “She’s just like her mother,” he would mutter. “Impossible to reason with.” As if his body responded to the resignation of his heart, he developed a slew of diseases that forced him to retire early. He trudged through a daily routine of coaxing pills down in the morning, watching television in the family room all day, and swallowing more pills before bed. An elderly female neighbor with a great mound of white hair dropped in once a week to check on him and do the housework that he could no longer manage. She would keep us company for a few hours, reminiscing with Jonah about record players and rock ‘n roll, and entertaining me with her keychain, which she swung in and out of my reach until we both got bored.

Jonah got too sick to walk up and down the stairs, so the neighbor woman fashioned him a bed on the couch downstairs. She dropped by daily to feed me, clean my cage, and jingle her keys.

I began to feel most acutely the monotony of the last sixty years in the silence that pervaded my cage during these final months. It was the absolute void of sound that drew from me a panic that I manifested in pacing and muttering. I would pace from one end of the cage and stare out: white wall, bed, desk, dresser, hallway; to the other side of the cage and peer about: white wall, bed, window, bathroom door, closet; until I felt loony with loneliness. It was in one of these spells, as I smashed my beak rhythmically on the stainless steel, that the neighbor lady entered the room and startled me out of my stupor:

“I’m so sorry, sweetie,” she said, frowning.

I didn’t understand it then, but I had lost my oldest friend.

Jonah’s passing didn’t register until Sunday came around and I didn’t hear the mower going in the backyard. At the height of his illness, in his darkest days, Jonah would still move his screaming body to the seat of the riding mower and cut the wild stalks of the Kentucky bluegrass lawn where one night, all those years ago, Maya had gathered the strength to leave him. But this Sunday, there was no mower, and because I couldn’t hear anything, I understood everything.

For a while after Jonah’s passing, nothing happened. The neighbor lady still came to feed me every day, but she no longer jingled her keys. Then men in loose tank tops descended in droves, moving things into boxes that were then moved out of the house. Some of them entered the bedroom and spent a long time pointing at me and talking amongst themselves. With so many movers in the house, it was impossible to grieve Jonah, but after years of silence, I relished the commotion.

The men managed to squeeze the old dresser through the door frame; in the process, a gawky youth bashed the corner of Jonah’s desk. The trinkets and picture frames on its surface crashed to the carpet, and the mover gathered them into a hasty pile on the floor. One of the picture frames had landed face up, and to my great surprise, I was afforded a view of a much younger Jonah and a much younger me. In the picture, I am sitting on Jonah’s shoulder. His oily brown hair is unkempt, as it was until his last day, but he has different glasses, the thick lenses of which amplify his eyes to twice their size. I’ve got my beak hooked around the left rim, and he’s wearing a look of uninhibited joy: mouth open in laughter, cheeks scrunched up—a look that died the day Maya left. It’s a polaroid from our trip to Mission Beach, back when we were both rather new in the world.

I was struck by the realization that Jonah had this picture on his desk, facing him as he slept, for the last thirty years. I’d never known. In all my memories of my first friend, of his greasy hands and deep-throated anger, his mute sorrow and ensuing lethargy, I remember him best as a kid who brought his parrot two thousand miles from home to the sea. We grew up together, and grew old together, and I am certain I will join him soon on his next adventure. I can feel the weariness sinking through each of my remaining feathers, extruding through the shafts and pushing towards the tips, weighing my wings down.

A woman entered the bedroom, her eyes flitting to the clutter of mementos on the floor. She was of medium height, with rosy skin and a winding ribbon of chocolate-colored hair. The sharp angles of her elbows and knees reminded me of Maya. She surveyed the room, pivoting slowly on her right heel, as if searching for clues on the walls. At the bed, she paused, and ran a finger over the immaculately tucked duvet. Jonah hadn’t slept there in months. She flipped around to rest on the edge of the bed.

“Damn it, dad,” she sighed.

I didn’t understand what she said, but I recognized that voice. Though deeper and more sorrowful than I recalled, I knew the vocalizations of my Honey Bear.

I emerged from the shadowy corner of my cage and began pacing back and forth on the perch. She looked up from the bed; her mouth fell open when she saw me.

“Lolly? ...My God!”

“What are you still doing here? Oh my goodness!” she cried, rushing to the bars.

“Honey bear! Honey bear! Honey bear! Honey bear!” I called happily, racing now along the beam.

She unlatched the door and pulled me from the cage. I beak-nuzzled her flushed cheeks and thought I might explode from happiness. My Honey Bear was so grown up, and she had come back for me. Her breath caught in her throat when she noticed my bald patches, which by now outnumbered my feathered ones. She raised me until my left eye was level with hers—two pools of green pouring into one yellow-rimmed bead—and we soaked each other up for a long, long time.

June 2021

I unfurl my wings to their marvelous extent and beat the sunrise into eddies as it streams through the far window. My throaty, unrestrained squawk diffuses over a vibrant canopy and a million voices like my own rebound in the sanctuary. I wheel towards the forest floor and pull out of my dive inches from the rich humus, evolving a brilliant arc that I terminate on a colorful perch on the trunk of a nearby ceiba tree. The air is alive with the cacophony of birdsong, each lending its own pitch to the harmony of the jungle. Whistling, I zoom over to the far windows and sit for a while, talking to the human visitors that come to see the rescued parrots. I always seem to know when Honey Bear is visiting; she sings poems to me, and I tap my beak on the glass in front of her hands.

When she first brought me here, I felt abandoned anew, but with Honey Bear just a few centimeters away, I can belong to two flocks now and forever.

For much of my life, I felt frustrated that I could only echo back to my loved ones what they themselves said, but now I’ve realized—isn’t love about doing without understanding why? Isn’t love about affirmation? Isn’t love just saying: I listen? I hear you?

I am old, and not as worldly or wise as I might have expected. But I am an expert in domestic matters; I have seen an endless variation of sunsets and sunrises, the rising sun filling the cracks in the blinds until they run over and rays spill forward into a home. I have taught a man how to love, and a woman how to leave, and a girl how to say goodbye. I have picked myself bare, built myself up, and now I will know peace.