and green, yellow, blue, and very dead parrot, lying on the ground in the frosted-gray grass. It was unmistakably one of the recently deceased Griph Morgan’s parrots. One of the parrots whose coos, screeches, and squawks had once harmonized roughly with Griph’s bagpipes, and had once colored my dreams red, green, yellow, and blue with unusual cycles of affinity and association. There he lay, stiff and ice-coated at my feet. He was frozen. His steely gray horn of a beak was stuck in a slightly unhinged position, as if in midspeech, or in reaching out to accept a remunerative cookie or cracker. His eyes and tongue had dissolved, leaving two gray sunken holes that looked back into the inside of his now-hollow skull where a walnut-sized brain had once been. The barbs of his colorful feathers were brittle with ice. I guessed that he had probably died at first frost. Where were the others? Griph had shared his apartment with ten birds. I suppose they had been released into the “wild” when the vandyked, bean-boiling, and backgammon-playing Griph Morgan passed away. I hoped that he was buried with his bagpipes. I hoped that the other nine birds had enough wisdom to fly south when the weather began to turn. But probably they did not. A creature raised in captivity with central heating to eliminate the seasons remains ignorant of the paths of his ancestors. So the birds had most likely simply settled in the branches of the closest thing they could find to the equatorial rain forests where their blood told them to go—which happened to be the trees of Washington Park. And when the winter came, they dropped dead from the trees. I imagined this parrot, an aristocratic flame of an animal, his bright red, green, yellow, and blue plumage contrasting ludicrously against the sepia-toned gray-and-brownness of Chicago, a bird colored like a magician’s flash-and-burst of obfuscatory smoke perched in the dying black-branched trees of Washington Park, chattering, hauking, fluffing up his neck feathers with his beak and smoothing them down again with passerine prissiness—outside in the world, free at last, and without a clue as to how to be a real bird in it, blithely whistling and chirping away, occasionally singing snippets of Scots Gaelic folk ballads, and shouting out with ebullient gusto at the bemused passers-by from his perch in the tree: “HELLO!”—shouting it as a salutation at first, as if cordially inviting small talk—“HELLO, HELLO!”—then later, as the people turned their faces away, in anger—“HELLO!”—and then, finally, as winter descended, in desperation—“HELLO?… HELLO?… HELLO?” And then he died.
I nudged the bird with my shoe. The frozen parrot was light as nothing, it moved across the ground so easily. Now my eyes were secreting tears. They turned to ice in my eyelashes. I looked up to see if anyone was looking at me: they were not. I tried to dig a little grave in the ground for this frozen parrot: I could not. I clawed my long purple fingers bloody trying to dig a hole, but the dirt was so tightly compacted and solidly frozen that to dig a hole in it would have been impossible without a shovel. So I gave up and turned back for home. I felt like a failure, and in many more ways than just in my apparent inability even to successfully dig a grave for a deceased parrot. But as I was heading home, as I was walking down Fifty-fifth and about to cross Cottage Grove, waiting for the light to change, I realized that it makes no ceremonial sense to bury a bird. Just that day, or maybe the day before, I had been sitting in the reading room of the library perusing a volume of Herodotus. I had come across a passage in which the historiographer related—with a clear note of revulsion—the Persian funeral custom, which was to lay the body of the dead stark naked on a platform in the open air at the very top of a tall tower, and let the birds pick the bones clean. Herodotus found the practice disgusting, unbefitting his notions of human dignity. For him, the only dignified methods of getting rid of a stiff were either to vaporize it with purgatory