The kids on the playground were behaving as kids on the playground always do — like savages and lunatics — until one of them noticed the parrot. There it was, darning its way through the trees, a bright red thimble trailing red, blue, green and yellow threads. Silently, banking into the breeze, it selected a branch high over the picnic table and landed.
The kids crowded against the fence to call out and whistle to it.
“Here, birdie, birdie, birdie!”
“You! Bird! Get down from there!”
I was 20, working my second summer at the daycare, and like the kids I was surprised if not astonished. In millions of trees and in thousands of days, none of us had ever seen a parrot outside of a cage before. The birdscape of Little Rock was brown, black, and beige: crows and starlings and robins. Even the occasional cardinal qualified as a minor spectacle.
I can’t explain it, but somehow, as soon as the parrot met my gaze, I knew what would happen — a moment of perfect clairvoyance. Down the bird flew in all its colors, sweeping across the playground, and suddenly it was on my shoulder, closing the T of its wings and its tail feathers. The little wires of its claws gripped me through my shirt. From its beak came a sound like pebbles clacking.
“What should I do?” I asked.
“Walk it inside,” another teacher answered. “Very slowly.”
We deposited the bird in a classroom down the hall from mine. Later that day, after lunch, my 5-year-olds begged me to take them to see it. “All right,” I consented, “but we have to be super quiet. The 2-year-olds are napping. We can’t wake them up or we’ll get in trouble. Not just you. I’ll get in trouble, too,” I said, and I meant it. I was a great entertainer but a worthless authoritarian. Whenever I wasn’t gathering the kids around me for a game or a story, my room was a carnival of noise.
That day, though, as a class, we crept along the hall and through the door at the opposite end, then went slinking past the 2-year-olds stretched flat on their mats in sleep. The parrot was perched on a stack of wooden cubbies. It cocked its head at us, hiking its legs one by one. We stood silently, watching it groom itself, until I made a follow-me gesture and the group of us stole back to our room.
We had broken the rules, the kids and I — and not only that but we had broken them together. It was the quietest five minutes I had ever spent with them.
Everyone suspected that the parrot was someone’s pet, and sure enough, a few days later, an older gentleman spotted the ad we had placed in the paper and came to the daycare to collect it. Beneath the fluorescent lights and between the bulletin boards, it was gone, but in the imagination of the school it lingered. The kids were young enough that for weeks they continued to ask me about my bird: How was my bird doing? Did my bird have a name? Had I been to visit my bird? And I was young enough to fantasize that for the briefest of moments, as I looked into those peculiar eyes, something inside the universe, or just behind it, had made a choice — that some representative wildness had seen me and picked me out, and for half a second I was exactly what the world wanted. I suppose I am still that young.