Parrots

Parrots are a recurring image in Perry Smith’s fantasies: first as birds that make a distant island alluring, then as singers in an imagined performance, and finally as a supernatural rescuer in a childhood dream. The image joins his appetite for adventure to a more personal longing for escape from punishment and helplessness.

Travel and the promise of Cozumel

While waiting for Dick in Olathe, Perry studies a worn map of Mexico, its place names circled in ink. Cozumel draws him partly because he has read that flights of parrots arrive from the mainland each year to lay their eggs there. The birds belong to a larger imagined prospect: an island beyond ordinary social pressures, where a traveler might live freely. In Perry’s map-bound daydream, parrots help make a faraway destination vivid and desirable.

The birds also surface in Perry’s own song about spring. He imagines them flying overhead in bright colors and singing, making their arrival a seasonal spectacle. Dick objects that parrots do not sing, distinguishing between their calls and song. The disagreement marks a contrast in their temperaments: Perry invests the birds with lyric possibility, while Dick answers from practical, literal observation. Perry is drawn to that practicality even as his own imagination transforms the ordinary bird into a singer.

The yellow bird of the childhood dream

A different parrot first appeared in Perry’s dreams when he was seven, living in a California orphanage run by nuns. After one beating for wetting his bed, he dreamed of a huge yellow bird, described as taller than Jesus and as yellow as a sunflower. It blinded the nuns with its beak, devoured their eyes, and killed them as they pleaded for mercy; then it gently lifted Perry and carried him away to paradise. The bird’s violence is directed against the figures who have hurt him, while its tenderness is reserved for the child it rescues.

As Perry grows older, the people from whom the bird delivers him change: older children, his father, a faithless girl, and an Army sergeant take the place of the nuns. The parrot remains constant, a hovering avenger in a dream that repeatedly answers vulnerability with overwhelming protection. Its role is not simply to represent escape; it reverses the child’s position, making those who wield power helpless and giving Perry the experience of being carried to safety.

The bird, the snake, and imagined refuge

The childhood parrot also shapes Perry’s later dream of a diamond-bearing tree guarded by a snake. The snake begins to swallow him, but the dream’s ending—one Perry withholds from Dick—turns the danger around: the bird devours the snake, and Perry rises toward a place of abundance. Perry had shared this ending with Willie-Jay, whom he trusted to understand it; he fears Dick might ridicule the parrot, a response he cannot bear.

In one version, the refuge is a feeling of power and invulnerability; in another, it becomes a lavish garden with white marble steps, fountains, an ocean view, and a table of food that Perry can eat without fear of cost. The parrot’s rescue thus culminates in more than escape from an attacker: it carries Perry toward a world where deprivation and punishment no longer govern what he may touch or enjoy. Across the map, the song, and the dream, parrots shift from signs of distant adventure to agents of a private, imagined deliverance.