Mozart Chronicles: Reality or Something Like It

Practical Advice on Modern Living from a Geriatric Cockatoo
Sometimes I tell people how Mozart talked to me, out loud, in English, in complete sentences and fully cognizant of what he was saying, and I get a half-cocked grin in reply, especially from people who have parrots themselves. The ones who have parrots themselves get mad or jealous. Their parrots don't talk to them like that, they say. "Well," I reply, "maybe they don't because they know you think they're just a bird brain or that you think you're some advanced being when actually it's them who are the advanced being."

That's usually the end of the discussion. But sometimes I know the person is a true bird lover, who really does admire the intellectual capabilities of their feathered friends. And to them I say, "Well I think that maybe deep, deep down part of you doesn't really believe they're as intelligent as yourself. You maybe think they are somewhat intelligent but you still think you're smarter." Then that's usually the end of the discussion. Then there are the two or three people I've met and heard about over the years, who believe in the deepest parts of their soul that their precious feathered friends are not only equal in intelligence but also in every other way. And those people and I get really excited when we talk to each other because we've had similar experiences. Then there are those people who nod silently, who 'know' but are afraid to speak up for fear of being labeled a nutty bird owner. And lastly there are the people whom do have these experiences with their feathered friends and simply ignore them, unprepared for what it may mean.

Fourteen Years of Silence Broken
I don't know why Mozart decided to start talking to me this way. He'd never spoken before in his fourteen years of captivity until the day we brought him home. I feel he sensed my deeply seated belief that his life and my life were on equal planes. But, as I've noticed some animals do, he probably watched the movie of my life which is playing above my head in my crown chakra in an endless rerun and saw that one day when I was eighteen years old and walked into a pet store. I hurried through the store looking for a certain kind of fish food for my goldfish, Romulus, when I came around an aisle and stopped dead in my tracks. There in a much too small cage, as is so often the case, in front of me, was a majestic Moluccan King Lory looking out at me.

His eyes held me captive. In them, I saw an intelligence, a sentience, a depth and a sorrow of which magnitude I don't often even see in the eyes of my fellow humans. I choked, his sorrow filled my heart with a profound sadness and a sense of injustice. This is the surge of clairsentience that any true animal lover is familiar with. For weeks afterward, his eyes haunted me. I never forgot him. Today, my heart still pangs with remorse for the fate of this gorgeous, wild being who should have soared his whole life over the mountainous gorges of Seram, Indonesia. So maybe Mozart saw that moment in my life, or other moments like it when I've connected with a nonhuman intelligence and been haunted for days and weeks afterward and been forever changed, forever pivoted into another being's point of view and unable to ever really go a full 180 degrees back to my own, wracked by some gross injustice I was powerless to stop.

But talk to me he did. Not very much at first, just simple stuff like saying 'thank you' and requesting favorite foods. I noticed his pronunciation was not that great though and I set about to help him speak more clearly. Parrots learn more about mimicking the sounds of human mouths by watching how those mouths actually form the sounds than by listening to them. So one afternoon, I set about to teach him one of the hardest sounds for a parrot to make, the 'b' sound, a plosive, as it's called. With my mouth close to his, as he hung off the side of his cage, I said distinctly, "Mozart, you have a black beak. Your beak is big and black," emphasizing the b's. He turned his head to one side and zoomed a big black eye up next to mine and said slowly but clearly in a sweet little voice reminiscent of Felix the cat, "And you don't have one?"

An Intelligence That Mirrors Our Own
My eyes opened wide and my jaw loosened and then dropped. I stared into his eye for a moment or two. In that big black eye, I saw glimmers of wisdom earned from years of jungle living and untold, harrowing adventures in short quick flashes. I thought about how this incredible bird was older than me, older than my parents even, and smart enough to be able to engage in conversation with a totally dissimilar species. But I didn't want to lose this moment. I fumbled and thought 'what do I have instead of a beak?' I parted my lips and bared my teeth, "No I don't have a beak, I have teeth," I said and tapped on my front teeth with my fingernail to show him the hardness of them. His focus turned to my teeth which truly fascinated him. He leaned out, reaching his beak forward and gently tapped one of my big front teeth with the curve of his huge beak. The two biological tools we shared, meant for rending food in some manner, clicked together and then he straightened up. His question was answered. He understood.

During that first week he shared with us, we immediately learned he abhorred any type of activity with the slightest hint of violence to it. One evening we sat back to watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail with Mozart. A favorite scene came on in which two knights engaged in a standing joust. As the knights heaved and hoed back and forth between thrusts of their lances, Mozart imitated and leaned back and forth and groaned and moaned much like anyone you might see watching a prizefighting match. Then one knight put his lance through the eyehole of the other's helmet and gallons of blood then gushed forth out of the lanced knight's helmet. Mozart froze, looked at both us to see our reaction and then screamed! He screamed and screamed in protest until we finally acquiesced and changed the channel. This type of violent entertainment was totally unacceptable to him.

The Parrot Pacifist
We soon learned that other unacceptable, seemingly violent, programming included basketball, hockey, and football. Any hint at all of physical contest and especially prizefights were totally unacceptable for us to watch with Mozart. Even if my husband, Christian, and I were to watch television downstairs with the volume turned down, he still knew what we were watching. We finally figured out he could see everything we could see and hear regardless of where we were physically. He would scream with a loud, angry shriek that was truly deafening. Even cracking an egg to make scrambled eggs on the weekend would elicit an angry shriek from the little Buddha Bird watching us in his mind's eye from upstairs. Our penchant for blowing away virtual people and creatures on my Playstation was just as unacceptable. Finally I would explain to Mozart over and over again, "Motz! (pronounced Motes) They're not real! It's ok! They're not real! It's just a game (movie, etc.)." After several years, Mozart was able to handle television violence and Playstation games a little better but he still had a tolerance threshold. During that time we discovered the antidote for all this horribly upsetting behavior was to watch ballet or Riverdance or some such programming. Elvis movies were a favorite. He stood transfixed in front of the television gently swaying his head back and forth in the true Moluccan cockatoo waltz as he watched Celtic dancers or ballerinas seemingly float across the stage, and Elvis too.

The Humorous Buddhist
As Mozart loosened up a little with his Gandhi-like approach to life, he displayed a sense of humor too. Playing with Chris one evening, he playbit him softly on the thumb. Chris seized the opportunity to admonish our little peace loving friend, "Hey you bit me!" he cried to Mozart in mock indignation, "I thought you were a Buddhist!" Mozart swung his head out near to Chris' and said smilingly, "I am!" After living with Mozart for about four years, I had come to rely on him for practical advice on daily living. Thinking he could foretell future events, I asked him about returning to a job I had very much disliked. "Pat," he said sadly, "don't go back." I ignored his wise advice and went back to that job, needing money very badly at that point. Six months later, I lay sleepless in my bed, pulling my hair out as I reviewed the day's events of working at an abusive corporation. Agonizing over the verbal abuse I dealt with daily, I could think of nothing to ease my mind and remove the heartless corporate vampires from my thoughts. At last, around 3am when all hopes of a restful night's sleep were lost, Mozart piped up from his cage, next to my bed. "Pat!" he said softly, gently, "they're not real."

Relief from Reality
Nothing in the world could have relieved my mental agony at that moment, nothing! But those three little words caused me to burst into hysterical laughter! I buried my face in my pillow and laughed as heartily as I have ever laughed in my whole life!

Of course he was right! They really weren't real! They were just hollow shells of non-awareness, judgmental sticks in the mud, stuck in the drudgery of the corporate rat race! They were just caught in the matrix of a slave world where people expend almost their entire lives in pursuit of the bottom line trapped behind a desk for fifty or sixty hours a week like captive birds in a pet store. I was still real. I hadn't sold out and lost my humanity in the process and caused others to suffer mental agony for the purposes of my own advancement on the corporate ladder.

I had learned from my sweet feathered friend that there is an entire reality of intelligence and altruism existing in natural harmony with the universe, the world of nature. I had learned that animals and every living being attunes easily, with almost no effort, to the universal intelligence to achieve whatever goal it sets for itself according to its desires. I had learned that wild animals living in nature were as evolved as they wanted to be and that we seemed to be more a pawn of our own evolution than truly free within it. The real world was the world where Mozart had come from, the rainforest, and in that place, spoken language is not a measure of intelligence, it is a veil that conceals the meaning of life which is simply to feel alive. I went to work the next day and put a sticky note up next to my computer monitor which read in large, bold letters, "They're not real." When the corporate vampires walked by, they saw it and looked unsettled. Who knows what they thought. It was their turn to lose some sleep.

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.