Ten Days With Napoleon

If you think you’ve ever had a crazy day, try spending ten taking care of my Great-Aunt Felicia’s keel-billed toucan, Napoleon. Every year since I was six, my parents have left on a ten-day Brazilian bird-watching tour with my mother’s aunt Felicia, leaving me with one grumpy nanny or another. One year, they came back with Napoleon.

“How’d you get him through customs?” I wanted to know, but they merely smiled. The next time they left, I was saddled with Napoleon as a caretaker.

My parents had had doubts about leaving me alone with a bird for over a week – after all, I was only nine years old – but crazy Felicia said to Mum, “Don’t you worry, Annie dear, Napoleon works free and he can coax your little girl here into doing her chores quicker than any of those half-wits you’ve hired.” “I am not little!” I’d protested, but the damage was done.

“OK, Nap,” I began as Great-Aunt Felicia’s tinny Buick sputtered and rattled into the horizon. “It’s just you and I now. My only question so far is: Am I taking care of you or are you taking care of me?” We both sat there for a moment, Napoleon and me, me on the sofa and him in his always-unlocked cage. The he squawked: “Eat your veggies! Take a bath! Go to sleep! Wake up!”

As it turned out, Felicia had been wrong about Napoleon’s brilliant babysitting abilities. In fact, it was he who went to the bathroom anywhere he liked, uprooted Mum’s precious daffodils from the garden, and absolutely terrorized the neighbours’ toy poodle Fifi. “You’ve got to stop doing that or you’ll get me in loads of trouble when they get back, Nap!” I lectured an oblivious Napoleon one afternoon when he flew in through the open window with a clump of Fifi’s fur in his striped beak. Sometimes I got so sick of his tyrannical ways that I locked myself in my room and twiddled with my radio until dinnertime.

On the fifth or sixth morning I woke up to the sound of something shattering. When I opened my eyes, I shrieked at the sight of my above-dresser mirror in shards, embedding the wooden surface of the dresser with scratches and reducing my third-favourite stuffed bear, Teddy, to mere shreds. Cawing in delight and flapping around the room in the midst of it all – was Napoleon.

That same day, I tied that horrible toucan by the leg to my bed-post and marched down to the nearest drugstore, where I purchased a heavy-duty lock for Napoleon’s cage, fuming and muttering all the while, “You just wait, Napoleon, I’ll make you wish you never left your nest in Brazil!”

He screeched indignantly when I stuffed him into the cage back home, but thankfully his objections died down within the hour. I fed him Great-Aunt Felicia’s homemade formula through the bars of his virtual prison – a vile-looking blend of corn, lettuce, carrots, and blue cheese. I thought that I had finally tamed Napoleon and was reaching in to give him a friendly pat when he retched and vomited his meal onto my arm.

It took me a full two hours to wash my arm, clean up the mess, and change the newspapers at the bottom of Napoleon’s cage while I once again subjected the bird to the bed-post.

It had been the longest ten days of my life, even worse than when my parents had hired Frieda Nussbaum to baby-sit me at age seven, and I had never been happier than when Mum, Papa, and Great-Aunt Felicia, returned from Brazil. It didn’t matter that: our neighbours threatened to sue for Napoleon assaulting Fifi; or that Felicia threw an actual tantrum when she found out that my bedroom’s authentic antique Victorian mirror was now in smithereens; or even that Mum screamed the house down about her “…beautiful, priceless daffodils! Why on earth didn’t you stop Napoleon from wrecking them?!”, because in the end, all was forgiven and as was tradition, they all treated me to an ice-cream at Taylor’s Sweets Parlour for putting up with whichever nanny I’d had for the duration of their absence.

Looking back, would I endure ten days of torture again just for a Butterscotch Pecan cone at the Parlour? Was a scoop or two really going to compensate for all that I’d been through with Napoleon? Do I really want to spend even another day in that keel-billed toucan’s presence? Do I really have a choice?