I Saw You…
A woman, a parrot, and a missed connection with a man in a pinstripe suit.

To the man in the pinstriped suit at McDonald’s, Thursday night: I should have stopped you from leaving.
And no, not because I felt guilty that I didn’t tell you about the toilet paper stuck to the bottom of your shoe. In fact, I tried to sneak up behind you and step on the little streamer as you walked by, but your stride was just too masterful. I liked that.
And not because I also felt guilty that I didn’t have time to give you back the slip of paper that fell out of your pocket. I don’t know who Francesca is — I mean, I know who she claimed to be when I called her, but I think you can do better. I just want you to know that, in case she ever tries to give you her number again.
Part of my regret about not stopping you was that I couldn’t warn you about the parrot on your shoulder. It was lifting its tail in a way that, although I don’t have a parrot of my own, made it look like a bird about to relieve itself down the back of your suit. I don’t know about birds, but I do know about suits, because my ex had one almost exactly like yours, and I know what an investment it was, so I’m not sure why you would carry a parrot you couldn’t trust on your shoulder.
And I suppose that’s what gave me pause: the parrot. I know I should be more open-minded; I can just imagine what my neighbor would say: “You’re writing to strangers in the paper, and it’s the parrot you’ve got a problem with? Those ads are how all them hookers wind up dead, you know. But then, you ain’t a hooker — are you?”
Not that I’ve talked to my neighbor about this. I don’t really know him, or anyone else in my building, really; not enough to talk to them about parrots, or men. But he’s right — or would be, if I asked him — there are some seriously sketchy people looking through the personals, like that one guy they caught stealing cotton batting from Michaels, and they found out he was making life-sized dolls of the people who didn’t answer his Missed Connections ads. The article said, he’d sew the ad to them — meaning, the effigy that looked like what he could remember of them — and stick them head to toe with giant kebab skewers. Apparently, his apartment smelled noxious, like swamp water or rotten asparagus, and it was coming from the dolls, so I can only imagine what kind of messed up herbal juju he was practicing on them.
So, there are a lot of unbalanced people out there, and maybe I’m being overly cautious, but for me that parrot meant danger. I’m not saying you have an attack-parrot. No, it’s more like you didn’t care what people thought of you, and that was, I suppose, what went wrong with my last relationship. He just didn’t care what people thought, which is okay when it’s about self-confidence, but not so great when it comes to your own partner — when it came to me. He was the kind of guy who would strut around with a parrot on his shoulder just so people would think he was a maverick, not because their parrot had to go to the vet, say, or…
That’s just it, I don’t know why a parrot would need to be out in the city otherwise. And I know there’s a vet near the McDonald’s where I saw you, because I did a search, and there’s one within a reasonable distance, where you might plausibly have gone to get him checked for fleas or worms or whatever parrots get. Like I said, I don’t know much about parrots, just that he looked cool on your shoulder, and then I thought damn, I’m just as susceptible as anyone else, and that’s exactly why guys like you do that, because you’re all the same, and the parrot probably doesn’t even want to be out there on your shoulder, but would rather be flying around the Amazon eating jackfruit and iridescent beetles, and for a minute I was mad at you for keeping this parrot from living its best life.
But then I thought maybe I shouldn’t make assumptions, and maybe you weren’t really an attention-seeking jerk, maybe you were just a guy taking his parrot to the vet. And I started thinking about pets and nurturing, and how you don’t always see guys willing to take on that responsibility, especially when it comes to something that can talk back, like a bird, or a girlfriend.
And then I looked up how old parrots can get, and was shocked to see the figure sixty years thrown around like it was nothing. Some even live to one hundred, longer than any dog, longer than most marriages, that’s for sure. And knowing that you were willing to commit to another living thing for that long made me see a whole new side of you. I mean, I might be off base here. You might have just won him in a bet. Maybe you don’t even know how long parrots can live, although I have to assume the vet told you.
To be honest, thinking about you and that parrot made me ask myself some serious questions: Am I ready to commit to anyone or anything for that long? And what if, god forbid, something happened to you? Would I be a capable parrot-parent? And, to be brutally honest now, would I even want to? Or would I find someone else to “lose” a bet with, and foist him off onto another unsuspecting shoulder, never to be seen again, just like I did with Pickles.
If we’re going to be co-parenting a parrot, it’s only right that you know my full record with animals.
Her name was Pickles, and she was a guinea pig. She was kind of skinny, and between her head on one end and her little haunches bunched up on the other end, she kind of looked like, well, a pickle. And I was positive that I could take care of her, but once I got her it didn’t take long for me to realize that I wasn’t the guinea-pig-mommy she deserved. I kept forgetting to feed her, and I have to admit, I hated cleaning out her pen. If I could have given her a tiny shovel and paid her an allowance to do it herself, I would have. And when I heard that guinea pigs could live up to eight years, I knew that would only mean eight years of misery and neglect for poor Pickles.
So, I pretended to lose her in an Uno game with the kid down the street, but I couldn’t tell my parents I was gambling, so I told them I let him have Pickles because he already had a guinea pig, and they’re social animals, and would do better together than in separate cages. I got the feeling that my mom didn’t really mind, anyway, because she was the one who usually wound up taking care of Pickles when I forgot.
I never went to visit Pickles after that, not once. But from what I heard, she thrived.
There you have it, I was a selfish pet owner. But I’ve matured a lot since then. I think I know now how much I can handle, and it’s a lot more than when I was nine. I think I could take care of a living thing now, like your parrot if, god forbid, such a thing were to be necessary. I think I could even be responsible for another human being, and not the way you watch over a caged thing like Pickles. I could care for someone like you care for your parrot, trusting that it’s on your shoulder because it wants to be, not because it was kidnapped from the Amazon or lost in a bet. If I found the right guy, I could care for someone like that, stay at his side without flying off, maybe stick around for eight years or eighty or eight hundred, if I just got the chance.
So, to the man with parrot and pinstripes, if you see this, please take a chance.

