Storm's Journal:  Rope Tricks

    Sometimes it just isn’t fair. You try to learn something about humans, try to help them, and all you get it is trouble. (Sigh)

    As you know, cleanliness for a tiel is easy, though time-consuming. We preen our feathers. All of them, every day. It takes us hours, but it keeps us clean.

    Humans, on the other wing, have so many cleaning rituals. They often clean their hands several times a day. (And they have special ‘hand’ towels to dry them with.)

    They sometimes clean their face with a face cloth. They may have a shower or they might choose a bath. They have a different (larger) towel for drying their bodies!

    They clean their hair differently (with shampoo. Makes you shudder, doesn’t it?) And they’ve even invented a machine to dry it! Then there’s shaving (where they scrape their hair off!) And there are moisturisers to keep their skin smooth (to fight the ‘wrinkles’ disease.)

    I won’t even start on the preparations that they go through to meet one another socially. (Maybe they choose their mates according to the amount of things that they do to themselves to make them look ‘presentable’. In that case, Andrew will always be single!!)

    Humans use ‘soap’ as their preferred choice of cleaner and Andrew brought a new kind the other day. Of course I got THE lecture: "This is not for tiels. It will make you sick. Don’t eat it!"

    Well of course I’m not silly, so I didn’t eat it, but I was curious about something. (But then, aren’t all tiels curious?)

    Andrew began to ‘sing’ more often in the shower. (If this was special soap to improve his ‘singing’, it wasn’t working.) So I checked the shower out and got quite a shock. Actually, it was so funny that I fell off the shower railing in hysterics. Andrew, not surprisingly, was not amused and shooed me out.

    So I spent a fair amount of time in the shower from then on. It had become an interesting place, until this morning.

    Andrew started ‘singing’ in the shower again so I flew in. What a sight! He was twirling his new soap-on-a-rope and swaying to his ‘music’. It was hilarious.

    What wasn’t so funny was the rope parting company with the soap! It shot past me and through the (closed) window! Andrew slipped in the shower and fell, dragging the shower curtain (and its’ mountings) onto the floor.

    A minute or so later Andrew limped towards me, holding the rope. "Did you do this?" he asked, shaking the almost chewed through rope under my beak.

    Now that really was a silly question! How many other tiels spent the last few days ‘exploring’ the soap-on-a-rope? And besides, I hadn’t done anything wrong! Andrew had said not to touch the soap, and I hadn’t.

    I looked up at him and gave him my best, most innocent look (but I have to admit I wasn’t too surprised when it didn’t work.)

    So now I’m in my cage (for my own protection according to Andrew) while some people put a new window in the shower and fix up the ‘curtain mess’. What a curse our curiosity is! But wouldn’t life be boring without it?

© Storm 2002

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