Columns 2003

Friends substitute for distant family

Here’s how you define a true friend.  They get out of bed late at night because you’ve called them and are hysterical and they drive you and your bird to Pet Emergency.  Not only that, but they sit there with you for two hours, long after the crisis has passed, and are actually still willing to have a civil conversation with you while you wait. That’s the kind of friendship that Alaska is famous for. That’s the kind of friendship that makes survival in the Bush possible.  That’s the kind of friendship that allows you to live far from your family and still know you have a support system that won’t fail.

It all started when my friend Leeanne and her daughter showed up one evening to help me lift my mattress and put a new bed skirt on my bed.  While she was there, I asked if she would clip my African Gray parrot Abdul’s nails for me, as they had gotten painfully pointed and sharp.  For some reason he has decided to boycott the rough perch in his cage that would keep his nails blunt.  This means that every time he comes out of the cage to visit with me, I get little pinhole injuries all over the hand he is standing on. And if some unexpected sound occurs that startles him and he grips my hand tightly, I end up with six little bleeding holes on my fingers.

We clipped the nails making sure to take only the tiniest bit from the end so as to avoid bleeding.  I watched him after the clipping for a few minutes, determined there was no bleeding, put him back in his cage, said goodbye to Leeanne and proceeded with other chores around the house.  When I returned to the living room about an hour later, his cage looked like a blood bath. As best I can tell, he attempted to rip a couple of his nails from his foot. 

I don’t know why he did this. He is at least a third hand bird whose history I don’t know except for the immediate years preceding his arrival in my home.  But he did it with a vengeance.

I immediately went into my panic mode.  It’s the only speed I have anymore in a crisis.  I ripped through the house looking for the styptic pencils I had carried down from Barrow three years ago for just such an emergency.  I couldn’t find them. I took him out of the cage and tried to apply pressure with a gauze pad. It didn’t stop the bleeding. And going around and around in my head was the statement I’d read so many times that birds will go into shock quickly from blood loss because they simply don’t have much blood to lose.

Since I can no longer drive at night, I went to the phone to call a cab.  As I dialed, I remembered an unexpected shopping binge at Costco’s that afternoon that left me with about $10 in my purse. That wasn’t enough for even a one-way cab ride.  It wasn’t till later that someone told me that cabs took credit cards.

That’s when I called Leeanne. She came over without a word of protest. She didn’t even throw things at me when we got to Pet Emergency and I unwrapped Abdul from his towel and the bleeding had stopped. She didn’t yell when we still had to wait there till the vet said it was ok to take him home.  And she only laughed a little when the vet suggested that Abdul go back on his anti-psychotic medication.

Perhaps the most important sign of our friendship was that she didn’t try to run me over with her car when we got back at midnight and I finally remembered where those darn styptic pencils were.

True friends are not easy to find in this world.  And probably we shouldn’t test their limits too often. But it sure is nice to know that when you have to, they’ll let you and your bleeding bird in their brand new car for a wild ride across town late at night even though they have an unreasonable fear of birds in general and specifically birds in close proximity to them.

True friends do all that and then still invite you to a bridge game at their house over the weekend.  What a first class substitute for the families so many of us left behind when we came here.