5:01 p.m. - 2004-11-16
That's no fuzzy duffle bag, that's ma daughter Fuzzy Mae, but you can set on her just the same.

Alexander and Fuzzy Mae

Reading about forty-plus's incestual birdies laying their eggs today reminded me of my own birdy's lewd behavior.

Alex (picture on your right) lives in a cage like all other birds. He is afraid of most toys so his cage is pretty bare except for this loop of knitted yarn we call "Fuzzy Mae".

Fuzzy Mae was a childhood project taught to my daughter by my mother who loved girl scout crafts and songs and one of her favorites was to take an empty wooden thread spool and drive 4 nails into the top. There was a way of winding the yarn around the nails and then picking loops of it off of the nails with a stretched out bobby pin that knitted the yarn into a little tube that ran down the hole in the spool. The idea was to pull the little tube out of the hole as you knit and eventually end up with a long long long thin knitted tube that you could then roll up and make pot holders or something out of. It was a nice little pocket craft that a kid could take with on long car rides or afternoons at grandmas.

My mother taught this craft to Michelle and her tube got to be about 10 inches long when she got bored of the project. The whole spool/nail/yarn assembly layed in a drawer for a couple of years and once, when she was cleaning out the drawer, she cut the knitted tube off and tied it into a loop and hung a couple of shiny do dads on it and we hung it in Alex's cage.

At first Alex just tried to avoid it, but after it hung there awhile and he realized it wasn't going to kill him or steal his food, he started picking at it. The fuzzyness of it felt good to him and he started to sit next to it and rub his face on it and talk to the the shiny silver doo dad hanging off of it.

When Alex got to be about 10 years old, I noticed him climbing into the loop and sitting in it like a swing. It was hanging near the bars of the cage and he would sit in it (On his tale feathers...on his butt) and hold onto the bars of the cage and start flicking his tail feathers side to side..."flick..flick"..."flick..flick". This strange behavior went on for a while and I wondered what he was doing. He would talk to his reflection in the shiny doo dad while he flicked..."pretty little birdy..pretty pretty birdie...."(wolf whistle)".."pretty, pretty, pretty".

One day I was watching him do this and all at once he stopped talking and stopped flicking. His underfeathers parted and a tiny pink nub emerged from the feathers. A long stream of something squirted out of the pink nub.....I was grossed out....ever since then we have called the little loop of knitted yarn. "Fuzzy Mae".

A year ago I changed cages on him. I hung Fuzzy Mae in a similar spot so he could sit in her and grab the bars as he had done in his old cage, but somehow the feeling wasn't right. At some point in time, Fuzzy Mae came untied and is now just a long strip of knitted yarn. He still talks to her but the feeling is gone. I wonder if they make birdie viagra?

P. I. Yarnsmith

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