THE RED PARROT FOR CHRISTMAS

by Dimitri C. Michalakis

When I was a kid and lived in Greece, around Christmas one year we went to the street with all stores in Athens to look at all the decorations out in the street and in all the windows.

And what I remember most is that someone we went with, the owner of the lumber mill next door to our house in Peristeri, and a distant cousin, a man with a pencil mustache and twinkling eyes, Yannis Michalakis, reached into his pocket and bought me a red plastic parrot with a yellow beak.

“Make sure he doesn’t talk too much in your ear,” he said to me with a wink of his twinkling eyes.

I smelled the parrot, and it didn’t smell like a bird, it smelled like plastic: but I felt for sure he was alive, and I made him chirp a lot, although I knew plastic birds didn’t chirp, especially parrots: the parrots I saw sitting on their perch and walking back and forth at the Papagalos coffee shops squawked their heads off.

But I treasured my plastic parrot, even though it smelled like plastic, and talked to it, because scary things were going to happen to me. That’s why we were in Athens, me and my yiayia.

We were taking the Queen Frederica to go to America, and then to Canada, to join my parents, who I hadn’t seen since I was a baby: they were the people who sent me clothes in the mail and their photograph smiling at me in the square box of the snapshot. I was now going to leave my yiayia and join my family, because I was old enough, and they wanted me there. I had been left behind for mysterious reasons.

Only I wanted to go back to Chios, where I lived with Papou and Yiayia, on their farm in Kofinas, where the bees buzzed, and the donkey tied under the tree brayed on the hill, and the sun traveled over the cement of the taratsa, until it went down completely and then the moon went up, and then you could smell all the flowers in the square oil tins that my yiayia kept them in.

“When we go there,” my yiayia tried to reassure me, while her dentures moved, only her teeth looked perfect, “your parents and your little sister will love you, and they will give you things, and I will send you flowers from Chios in the envelope.” “They’ll be dead,” I said. “Not these flowers,” she said. “They’ll still smell and remind you.”

She did send me flowers from Chios, and they did smell, but they were also brown and wilted. Only they made me feel better, and that Christmas I had my parrot to talk to, and brought him to America and Canada, where he was soon replaced by flashier toys and I lost him, but that one Christmas he brought me hope in a scary world.

I hope you enjoyed your Christmas and hope it brought you the warmth of family and the comfort of faith.