Bird by bird

You have probably been biting your nails with anxiety over

 this boy...

who you may remember bullied me with three solid weeks of a freakishly clean room in order to obtain a bird to keep him company during the hours he spends doing homework and playing melancholy cello music in his lonely room.

I won't torture you an account of the grueling process and l-o-n-g afternoon of searching for the perfect parakeet.  Low lights include:

• three pet stores, all which smelled like untrained dogs and moldy amphibians

• the painstaking evaluation to find  the perfect architecture in a "cage" that doesn't look like a "cage"

• watching Joey cock his head from side to side, staring without blinking, seeming to morph into on the of the birds he was piercing with the laser like focus of his intent blue eyes

• an excruciatingly long process of elimination to choose an ideal bird amongst the fluttering herd

Dear readers, may I introduce...

Pam

All this for a bird named after a cooking spray