Sitting reading my book in the waiting area at the car service center, an older woman entered. I looked up only far enough to see she held an empty birdcage in her hand.

That's odd, I thought. Maybe she just bought it and doesn't want to leave it in her car because, you know, those car repair guys, they're always trying to steal birdcages out of cars. I went back to reading.

The waiting area has an enormous fish tank, at least eight feet long by three feet tall. The woman set her birdcage down and began talking to the fish.

I looked up to observe the madness. Perched on her hand was a small green parrot. She waved the bird slowly past the tank, stopping from time to time to point out fish-related details to the bird.

She made baby talk to the bird. Something about the 'shiny fishy-wishies... Yes!... Shiny!.. Yes. Shiny fishy-wishies" and on and on. I noticed the woman kept looking back to me (besides the fish, I was the only other captive in the area) to see if I'd noticed her and her bird. Proud, she seemed, of that bird and her relationship to it.

I couldn't help wondering if the parrot wasn't her key to unlocking the doors to human social interaction. Perhaps she thought everyone, even me, would find the thing adorable, and I'd begin talking to her about it. That did not happen, for there is no such skeleton key to unlock my particular social lock.

The bird seemed incapable of intellectualizing the fish, and appeared to pay no attention to them. I'd go so far as to say the bird was a bit miffed at being distracted from its object of real fascination: the woman's ring, which it kept pulling at with its curved beak.