Baby Parrot Rescue

This morning, on my way back from the market, I discovered a small green parrot on the steps of my building, clearly in distress. I knew right away that this was not someone’s pet, as we hear the parrots every morning in the oak trees, and the other evening a flock had noisily flown across our terrace through the pines. The theory is that parrots were introduced to the eternal city back in the 1990s and have adapted very well to la dolce vita. They are called parrochetto (parakeet) and come from Asia and Latin America.

Immediately, I got out my camera and took a few pictures and two short videos, which also enabled me to see if it had a broken wing or other visible injury. It kept looking back at me nervously and tried to climb the step, using its beak and feet to pull itself up to the next level. I tried opening a few grapes to see if it would eat, but it just wanted to hide. I checked to see if the neighbor’s cats were around, and then went upstairs with my bags.

My mother was immediately interested when I showed her the videos, and we decided I should go back down with my garden gloves and see if I could help it move along to safety. I found it curled into a corner, head tucked down into feathers, hoping to make itself invisible. As I approached, again it squawked loudly in distress, and was clearly not able to fly even though it was trying. Meanwhile, the cats were getting curious, and I shooed them away, but realized I had to get the bird inside the lobby of the building away from the cats. I went back upstairs to get a box, cornered the bird, and gently lifted it into the box and put the cover on.

I headed over to Maurizio, who sits at the gate entrance about a block away, as he had recently helped me figure out what to do when some bees were thinking about setting up a nest on our balcony. When he saw me coming he jokingly asked if I had an explosive, but I said, no, it was just a dilemma. Together we tried to get the parrot into a nearby tree, but it flapped its way back down to the ground, clearly too young to fly. For the time being, we left it hiding in the bush, and I returned to have lunch with my mother.

All through lunch we worried about the baby parrot. Would its mother find it? Every little bird sounded like a mother parrot in distress. At least I had managed to prevent the cats from attacking it, but I couldn’t stop thinking about whether and how it might survive where we had left it. I went back down to look for it, with no luck, and then asked Fausto (now guarding the entrance) if Maurizio had filled him in. Fausto is also a nature lover and when we first moved in, told me there were foxes and squirrels who lived in our apartment complex gardens. Fausto provided the happy ending: one of the regular delivery men had offered to give the baby parrot a safe home in his garden in the country.

Mimi on the balcony

This little saga reminds me that the third inhabitant of our home, Mimi, is truly a part of the family as beloved pets tend to be. My mother has asthma, so pets were out of the question when I was growing up, and I only got my first cat when I lived in Milan. When I moved back in with my mother, Mimi was confined to my bedroom for the most part, because I was nervous that her fur and dander would further aggravate my mother’s allergies. But it quickly became clear that as long as I regularly groomed her, and my mother kept her out of her bedroom, things were fine. Mimi seemed to understand the boundary, but would sit at the edge of the room when we were both in there as if to say, can’t I come in too? Now, in our apartment in Rome she goes everywhere and loves to nap in the afternoon with my mother. She provides comfort when needed, levity with her funny little behaviors like licking my chin in the morning, and we love to spoil her with salmon treats. Having an animal to care for seems important to someone with a degenerative disease like Alzheimer’s. Just as saving the baby parrot made us feel we did our good deed for the day.

When There Is Resistance

Me, with two colleagues when I taught 6th grade
in Edmonds, Washington

As a teacher, you deal with resistance all the time. Most students will not willingly do as they are told if they are asked to do something they consider unpleasant or worse, or that may compromise their social standing with peers. I can only imagine how hard it is these days to get them to do the multiple-choice tests and practice tests that have invaded schools like a nightmare garden weed.

Schools, like gardens, should
be weed free.

Teachers try all sorts of tricks, bribes, points, threats of pleasures denied or even punishments, and often have to enlist help from parents and administrators to get students to comply and behave. These often don’t work, and if they do, the effect is mostly temporary. Seasoned veterans know there is a magical antidote to resistance: choice.

We all love freedom, but we really love freedom to choose what we want, when we want to do it, and even whether we want to do it at all. Most students don't enjoy that sort of freedom in schools. I used to tell my students that choice is like magic fairy dust in the classroom; the more choices you provide for your students, the more harmonious and happy a climate you will create.

The shift from daughter to caretaker of a parent is not necessarily smooth or linear. For some, it comes after a sudden change in health status, such as a stroke, or a fall. For others, it is a slow process that can encounter a fair amount of resistance. In our case, the switch in roles is still a bit fluid, but it has helped that we are now in Italy where it is natural for me to be in charge of most things, and not just because I drive and speak Italian fluently. My mother still gets to tell me what (not) to wear, comment on my weight, suggest when something needs to get fixed or cleaned up. I have worked hard to help her understand that I get to make sure she takes her pills three times a day, drinks enough water, not too much wine, eats healthy balanced meals, and gets some exercise. We have a little joke that when she complies but unwillingly, she’ll say, “Yes, Mother.”

 

Mimi doesn't handle Monday morning very well.

But there was one seemingly insurmountable hurdle where my mother’s stubborn Irish streak coupled with my own softie sympathies meant a prolonged procrastination. My mother has macular degeneration (AMD) and was being treated in the U.S. with anti-VEGF injections on a regular basis. I have a hard enough time putting a contact lens in my eye, so the idea of shots into the eyeball, even with the tiny needles they use, was appalling. In October a doctor friend forwarded an article about increased mortality in patients being alternatively treated with an IV drug called bevacizumab, and when I read up on this compared to the drug my mother had been getting, Lucentis, I convinced myself that these monthly eye injections were another medical scam targeting vulnerable seniors and gave in to my mother’s refusal to see an eye specialist. Potential side effect of death? NO THANKS. The final nail in the coffin was the warning from my mother’s American doctor that Italian law required the injections be done in an OR hospital setting.

Nine months later when I noticed my mother was having more difficulty reading even with the 3.5 magnification reading glasses, I felt guilty for ignoring my health care responsibilities on her behalf. I made an appointment with the British doctor our American doctor had recommended, and just casually let my mother know. “No! I am not going!” was her response for the days leading up to the appointment, but finally she just had to comply. It helped that because of her Alzheimer’s she did not remember the regular eye injections back in the U.S. and was only resisting in general to the thought of additional doctor visits.

Thankfully, he was one of the best doctors I have ever met. For one thing, he knew a lot about nutrition and supplements and the importance of eye vitamins with lutein, zeaxanthin, and meso-zeaxanthin, suggesting either Macushield or Astar Plus brands. He said I should be taking them as well. He checked my mother’s vision, and examined her eyes, then quickly made an appointment that afternoon in another office where he had the machines to take the pictures to look for macular edema. He did not admonish me for waiting so long to have her eyes checked, but said she was lucky to have gone without Lucentis for so many months. We agreed it was time to have an injection in one eye and made the appointment for the following week in a different office. Relieved that the OR was not in a hospital-like setting, I helped my mother understand what needed to be done. She was an excellent patient throughout, and it turned out to be only a minor ordeal with a minimal reaction post injection. Now there is a follow up appointment this week and there is no resistance.

But what of my magical effect of choice? Well, it turns out that sometimes you have to create a sort of false choice. “If you don’t go to this eye doctor, you risk losing your eyesight and that would be worse, right?” Teachers know how to use this one with particularly obstinate behavior. “You have two choices. Either you do what I am asking of you, or you can call home to explain why we are having this discussion right now.” Um, okay, I really don’t want to talk to my parents with you listening in, so I guess I’ll take choice number one. Works every time.