When we were kids just about every store we went into such as Woolworths, Penneys, etc. always had a pet section full of parakeets and canaries. Now days you don’t see any of them in the pet section of any store any more. Where have all the birds gone?  When we were kids our Uncle Floyd gave us his parakeet name Jerry. He was blue colored and we at first hung his cage in the kitchen on a bracket that went into the wall. Later on we hung it in our room right over my twin brother’s bed. We would open up Jerry’s cage door and push our finger against his chest and he would get on our finger. I remember how neat it felt to have a bird sitting on my finger. We would put Jerry on the edge of our cereal bowl and he would eat the cereal right along with us. We also would hold him up so his head would go into our open mouth and he would pick the food out of our teeth. (Gross, huh?) Our mother would really be bugged when we did both of these things with Jerry. She always said, “Don’t do that or you’ll liable to get “Parrot Fever!” This of course never scared us and we figured there was no such thing as “Parrot Fever”. But on the other hand, that would explain why I’ve always eaten a lot of crackers and sunflower seeds and tend to repeat things people tell me and why I can only go to the bathroom by standing on a perch… When you’re kids, you do all sorts of gross things that would now bother us as adults. So at the time I can now understand how she felt about it. One time we found that Jerry had laid an egg and we figured out that “he was a she”. We really got a kick out of Jerry’s little white egg and we hoped that it would hatch so we could get another parakeet free! One day Tommy Moon came over with his parents and reached into the cage and said, “What’s this”? Well needless to say, he squeezed it and made instant scrambled egg! Well, so much for the free parakeet! Eventually a very odd thing happened. While Jerry was in the kitchen, we always had the radio on and listened to KYW. One day we noticed that Jerry was mumbling something and we finally figured out that she was mimicking the radio announcer! We were very surprised because we never figured that parakeets could “talk” like parrots. That’s the only things Jerry ever said. It’s a good thing too because if it would have repeated the things my mother said whenever she got upset and yelled at us that would have been very embarrassing, indeed. Could you imagine a parakeet saying, “You kids are going to be the death of me yet!” And other selected things that I’d better not repeat on this “Safe Surf” web site! We often let Jerry out to fly around the house. After he landed on something, he would be panting and out of breathe. This was due to the fact that he didn’t fly that much and was out of shape. One day the front door was left open and Jerry flew outside. I remember how he flew up and down. My brother and I grabbed a big shirt from the laundry pile, ran outside, and threw it over him and caught him and brought him back into the house. THAT was a really scary experience since we thought sure we’d lost Jerry forever. Hmmm, I wonder if our mother left the side door open on purpose so we wouldn’t get “Parrot Fever”? Hey, wait a minute! I just Googled the phrase “Parrot Fever”. Oh my goodness! To my GREAT surprise, THERE REALLY IS SUCH A THING!!! HONEST! I copied some information right from the site and here it is…”Parrot fever is a rare infectious disease that causes pneumonia in humans…” Whoa! Did we ever dodge a bullet!!! I guess the things our mothers warned us about were TRUE after all! I’ll even bet that Santa Claus REALLY DOES EXIST because our mothers said so!!!! Oh well, if any of you happen to find the elusive parakeet now days, watch out for “Parrot Fever”!!! And don’t forget to send your Christmas list to Santa Claus!!!!