Other things written by Terry Ryan

ENJOY!!!!
People have been known to inherit valuables from deceased relatives – sparkling heirlooms, the family silver, works of art, outright cash – but Evelyn Ryan didn’t leave her ten children any of these things because she didn’t have them to leave.

Not that my mother didn’t own items of earthly value; she did a more-elderly-than-quaint hundred-year old house in Defiance, Ohio, and the JC Penney stock she had loyally and painstakingly acquired over the years as a clerk in the fabric department. But in Mom’s world, wealth had little to do with money. The best thing she left us were intangibles, like her sense of humor and her laughter, which still rings in my memory – and in fact, in my house.

When my mother died, I inherited a bird. Not a lightweight canary, but a foot-high African Gray Parrot who talks and laughs in the rich, gravely voice of 85 year-old Evelyn Ryan. These days I wander around in a t-shirt that says: “My Mother Went to heaven, and All I Got Was This Lousy Parrot”, but this is only half true. There is nothing lousy about Clancy.

My brothers and sisters and I bought Clancy to keep Mom company after Dad died in 1983. She picked him out from a group of baby parrots in a pet store near Toledo. They bonded instantly – my gray-haired mother and this gray-feather bird with a bright red tail.

The summer before Mom died in 1998, I went home to Ohio for a three-week visit. The first morning, I awoke to laughter and conversation coming from downstairs and wondered what fun-loving neighbour had dropped by. Once downstairs, I discovered that the source of all this joyful noise was simply Mom and Clancy going through their morning routine. He kept the conversation rolling, and his comments, with a voice identical to hers, ha them both in stitches.

“Where’s my shoes?” he asked. She laughed and said that her shoes, not his, were lost. “Don’t know where I put stuff”, he said. They talked all day like this, taking turns commenting on my mother’s ragtime piano playing (“Isn’t that pretty?”) and on his backyard view of Mom’s flower garden full of white hollyhocks and orange day lilies (“It’s beeyootiful”). They looked after one another, too. If either of them dozed off, the other would say, “You’re so quiet. Are you okay?”

Clancy learned every word and sentence from Mom, of course. For years she told him when the birds visited the back yard (“Look at all the little birdies”) or when the morning paper hit the front porch (“That was the paperboy”). He learned to repeat those sentences when appropriate, but he can ad-lib, too.

“There’s someone at the door”, he said during my visit home. Hearing this, Mom walked out to the front door, only to find no one there. “Now don’t tell me there’s someone’s there when they’re not”, she told him. “I went all the way out there for nothing”. He waited just a beat to reply, “There’s a little birdie at the door”.

My mother died at home, after a three-week illness, and Clancy was by her side the entire time. Near the end, the two of them had the best seat in the house, in front of the double-wide open window in the bedroom, where they could see trees, birds, the tops of the ancient evergreens lining the front of the house, and the bell tower of St. Mary’s Catholic Church, just a block away.

When the parish priest came to visit, Clancy was a surprise participant in the conversation, reducing what should have been a solemn event into unholy hilarity. Throughout the priest’s booming recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, Clancy shouted his own version, “Good heavens! Good Heavens! Those of us in the room somehow managed to stifle our laughter, but just as prayer time came to an end, and as Father Ed delicately placed a communion wafer in my mother’s mouth, Clancy yelled, “OH SH*T!”.

Clancy is now 17 years old, and we’ve been together for the past four years. It took him many months to forgive me for not being my mother. Short of saying, “What have you done with her?” he let me know I wasn’t his first choice in companions. “NO!” he shouted whenever I cam near, “Don’t you do it!” He became an expert marksman, flipping sunflower seeds at me with rat-tat-tat precision, and taking canapé-sized bites out of the kitchen cabinets.

But time seems to have done its magic, and now we banter back and forth, just as he and Mom used to. When the phone rings, he carries on his part of the conversation in the background. “Hello?... uh huh… okay… all right”. When I eat, he says “How’s your food?” Several weeks ago I dumped a basket of clean laundry on the floor to sort it, and he said, “Where’s my shirt?” And best of all, fifteen minutes into my first attempt at silent meditation in the living room, he called out from his cage in the kitchen, “You’re so quiet. Are you okay?”

I miss my mother more than I can say, but her loss has been lessened somewhat by the appearance of this avian doppelganger in my life. I carry Evelyn Ryan in my heart, of course, and always will, but I also suspect that she’s still here, sitting up there on the perch underneath all those feathers.