Coco Calling No.302 - On Trying to Do the Right Thing
Coco
6 hours ago
3 min read
It’s always very important for parrots to keep up their appearance. So, we spend a great deal of time rearranging our feathers in order to look our best. And of course, we have a few places that we can’t quite get to, so that’s when we help each other out with a spot of mutual preening.
And I always like my human owner to look at his best, so if I spot some sort of blemish on him, I always try to rectify it. So, for example, if he has a plaster on his finger, or maybe a protruding blister, or a scab from some form of gardening injury, I always do my best to yank it off with my beak, because I’m that sort of bird. And whenever I help him out like this, I always expect to be thanked afterwards, but it somehow makes him rather cross. I’ll never fully understand humans.
Mind you, my owner himself has sometimes tried to be considerate towards others, and things haven’t always turned out quite as he’d hoped. For example, he recently undertook the Herculean task of cutting the grass for the first time in many months. There was a lot to do; the grass was very long and wet, and his cutting machine kept clogging up and stalling. He was at it for more than four hours, but he got there in the end through perseverance. And he expected our next-door neighbours to be very appreciative as their lounge overlooks a large section of our grass. However, the following day, he discovered that all the time he’d been out mowing, our neighbours had lost their TV reception, so he’d rather spoilt their day!
And then we recently had a tradesman visiting the house, so my owner made him a mug of coffee. The tradesman asked for ‘two sugars.’ Well, none of the humans in the house take sugar, so he had to hunt around to find where it was kept. Eventually, he opened a jar which appeared to be full of demerara sugar, so he added two heaped spoonfuls to the coffee, and gave it to the tradesman. Later in the day, after the tradesman had gone home, my owner found the mug which was still two-thirds full. So, thinking to himself that the tradesman couldn’t have been very thirsty, he poured the coffee out into the kitchen sink. But a great deal more than coffee came out. In fact, great dollops of sludge plopped out and immediately blocked the plughole. In fact, it took two full kettles of boiling water to get everything to swill away. My owner took another look at the pot of demerara sugar and promptly discovered that it was, in fact, full of milled seeds which his wife enjoys with her morning yoghurt. Once in the coffee, the seeds had swollen up to form a glutinous mass, so the poor tradesman must have had a bit of a shock.
In this life, you can have the very best of intentions but not always get things right. But you know, it’s far better to try to do what you believe to be right than what you know to be wrong. And if you keep trying for long enough, more and more of those little things will come right in the end!
“Wisdom is doing the right thing at the right time.”
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