Mozart Chronicles: The Spaghetti Incident

Mozart had been living upstairs in the bedroom with us for his three month quarantine period.

His cage was too big to put anywhere else really. So we set him up for the winter right next to the bed and bought him an infrared panel heater to keep him warm.

Mozart enjoyed eating and when we first adopted him, he was rather portly. He would tell me years later that the only good thing about captivity was the food. I learned quickly that his favorite food was macaroni and cheese. After giving him a bowl of it one evening, I walked away down the hallway when he called after me "Thank you!" at the top of his lungs which means it sounded like he was using a megaphone, "THANK YOU!"

I decided to try giving him other pastas. So after a spaghetti with meat sauce supper one night, I took his bowl and filled it with some leftovers. I expected him to start scarfing it down immediately but instead he gave me a kindly compassionate look and ignored the dish entirely.

I was puzzled. "Mozart," I asked, "don't you want to even try the spaghetti and yummy meat sauce?" He used one of his big black eyes to zoom in quizzically on the bowl, tilting his head to one side. Now that he was sure he had my attention, he put his head in the dish and began to eat.

Or so it seemed.

In amazement, I watched as the huge bird spent nearly an hour tenderly picking each tiny piece of beef out of the pasta sauce and placing them all to the side of his bowl in a little pile.

I couldn't believe my eyes. One after the other, a seemingly infinite number of tiny little pieces of meat made their way through his beak away from the spaghetti and into the little pile beside it. He was so careful that not a single piece of the meat was bruised or broken.

Mesmerized, I sat down near him and watched him as he continued this daunting task. The little pieces of beef seemed endless in number. Yet he kept on, with the same patient gentleness extended to each piece of meat.

Finally he was done and then, and only then, he began to eat the now cold spaghetti. He sat back on his perch and slowly sucked a long piece of pasta up into his beak. I stared at the pile of ground beef which had been extracted so painstakingly from the pasta sauce and noticed that he had also carefully licked off all the pasta sauce from each piece of meat. Each piece of meat was now as clean as it was before it had been cooked. The little pile of meat was not a pile, it was a funeral mound.

He looked at me, smiling a cockatoo smile, his cheek feathers curled up around his beak in contentment. My eyes watered. I knew that he had been teaching me that he considered each little piece of meat to be sacred, that it had once been a cow and that he respected that cow, that he was honoring the soul that had once animated this flesh and that he would never, ever eat the flesh of another being.

I lowered my head and felt ashamed. Here this gentle bird, who had the capacity for such destruction, had used his powerful beak in gentleness to honor a life that I had not even considered for one minute. I looked at my huge pink bird with new eyes.

"Are you a Buddhist or something?" I asked him.

His cheek feathers curled up even more totally concealing his beak in a big smug smirk. From then on we began calling him our "Buddha bird" and wondered to ourselves how we, people who dedicated all of our resources to helping and saving animals, could have turned our backs on those on our dinner plates. And so we began to struggle with our diet and started a long, arduous journey towards becoming vegetarians.

Five years later, and only about a month after Mozart had left his body and traveled into spirit, we sat in the sun room of our new house. It was a difficult time. We had lost our beloved Mozart, a pet who had become our mentor and sort of our grandfather, and we had moved into our new house without actually owning it yet due to the incompetence of our mortgage broker. We were trying to celebrate and lift our spirits a little. Chris had bought a couple of steaks and grilled them up. I didn't want any but I knew Chris was not ready to become a vegetarian and bringing this up now would only add to his stress. So I remained quiet.

Chris put the plates on the table and sat down. He picked up his cutlery and began polishing it with his napkin. "I wonder," he perused, "if we're going to get ripped off in this real estate deal."

From our neighbor's yard came a loud scream! It wasn't a human scream! It was the unmistakable territorial yell of a Moluccan cockatoo. I knew it was Mozart, his spirit had been hanging around for weeks making incredible things happen. He was watching over us. But would Chris realize this also?

"What was that?" Chris asked, startled and rattled. I said nothing. "That sounded like Motz!" he added.

"It was Motz," I said quietly.

Wide eyed Chris looked at his plate. He was not surprised that our cockatoo friend had the ability to still manifest in the physical world. I waited while he stared longer at his steak. I could hear Mozart now in my head, his deep but soft voice was gently urging me, "BE-come vegetarians..."

Finally I broke the silence, "What are you thinking about?" I asked.

"I'm thinking about Mozart picking all those little pieces of meat out of the meat sauce," he answered incredulously. I knew it! I knew Mozart was right there, working us both over as best he could. But would he really be able to get through Chris' sometimes very thick skull? And his selfish attachment to flesh food? Yes! He was that powerful.

"He wants us to be vegetarians doesn't he?" Chris looked at me rather dolefully.

"Yes dear, he does. Can we be?"

"We'll work on it," he replied.

It would be another year and two Moluccans later before Chris' realization would become reality. Chopin would come and go and then Happy, the 9 year old domestic raised Moluccan, would join us. He and Chris became extremely close and somehow, Happy managed to pick up where Mozart had left off, and Mozart was able to continue his work through Happy! For one summer day after spending the entire afternoon snuggling with Happy, Chris announced during dinner, "I think we should do it. We should get ready and take the plunge and become vegetarians. I think it's the right thing to do."

Silently I rejoiced. Now Mozart wasn't the only Buddhist in the family. We all were.

---

As I prepared to write this story, one I have told to many friends and acquaintances over the years, I sifted through old photos of Mozart. I was stunned to find this photo which is an actual photo of The Spaghetti Incident and clearly shows the pile of ground beef in a little funeral mound in his bowl. Surely Mozart planned everything carefully, including my finding this photo.