She Was Not Quite What You Would Call Refined

I kept reassuring myself that it is perfectly normal to debate coffee preferences with a parrot. Especially a parrot with a coffee addiction. I lounged on a metal chair outside my favorite Seattle coffee shop, Caffe Umbria, in the quaint old village of Ballard, my neighborhood in north Seattle. My back leaned against the shop window. Princess Tara sat on my lap. She studied a cup of coffee, an iced americano in a plastic cup, I held in my hand. I fixed my eyes on the old Ballard City Hall bell tower across the street to purposely avoid the stares of customers scurrying into or out of the coffee shop. I tried to pretend there was nothing out of the ordinary about a gigantic gorgeously blue feathered hyacinth macaw parrot sitting on my lap carrying on a conversation with me about my coffee.

Princess Tara pinned one of her big black eyes directly at my face. Because her eyes are set on opposite sides of her head she could only pin one big black eye at me at a time. This made the eye pinning even more disconcerting to me. I kept my eyes focused on the crows cavorting on the bell tower. Princess Tara dropped her head and seized my thumb with her beak. She squeezed. Hard.

“Ouch!” I blurted out. My gaze fell to Princess Tara’s huge black beak squeezing my thumb. With the equipment to exert three hundred pounds per square inch, that beak could take my thumb clean off, if she wanted to. Thankfully, she generally did not want to. I yanked my thumb out of her beak.

“I want a frappuccino,” Princess Tara insisted. She knocked her beak against my iced americano, sloshing coffee onto my lap. A couple of people stopped to stare at us. I looked up. A young couple standing next to the table looked down at me. They held hands. Their other hands held coffee cups just purchased in the shop. I studied their hands. Dark skinned. Middle Eastern or North African. Most likely Amazon or Microsoft techies. The woman flashed a brilliant grin at me. “What a beautiful bird,” she said, with a distinctly British accent. “Does it talk?”

I could almost see my reflection in her gleaming ivory smile. Of course the bird talks, I thought to myself. The woman just heard her talk. Maybe she thought I was a ventriloquist. “Oh yeah,” I finally replied. “When she wants to.”

“Can you make it talk?” the man asked with an accent more south Asian than Middle Eastern.

Princess Tara cocked her head to glare at the man. “We are trying to drink our coffee!” she exclaimed, in the sultriest voice this side of Lauren Bacall. The man jumped back a step, nearly dropping his coffee cup. The woman burst out laughing. She danced away, pulling her boyfriend with her. They parked at the table farthest from us. The man kept staring back at us suspiciously.

Princess Tara yanked my thumb again to bring my attention back to her. “I want a frappuccino,” she repeated.

I glared at her as I took a sip of my iced americano. “They don’t have frappuccinos here,” I insisted. “Frappuccinos aren’t good for you. Anyway, I drink americanos.” I set the cup on the table next to Princess Tara. Princess Tara’s head dropped to the cup. Her beak bopped up and down like one of those plastic dunking birds.