Chris Kagy and I have known each other far too long. He’s starting to really scare me.

Back in the late 80s, when I was in college, I went with my girlfriend to see Don McLean perform. It was a truly awful concert. Clearly he’d been singing American Pie so long that he could only sing the embellishments and not the actual melody. And he stopped half-way through to get chatty about random stuff. It was a bad concert. At any rate, my girlfriend had, shall we say, a distinctive laugh. At one point, Don said something funny and she laughed out loud. He stopped, looked out into the audience and asked “Did somebody bring a parrot with them?”

I haven’t thought about that in well over a decade.

Yesterday, Jack came home from preschool talking about how they studied Van Gogh’s Starry Night in school and how he painted his own copy which I need to go into school to see as it is hanging in the children’s gallery. All evening, Don McLean’s Starry Night was going around in my head and somewhere in there I remembered the parrot comment and laughed and thought, “I should blog about that.”

And then I promptly forgot about it again.

Just now, sitting in the office with all the windows wide open (on our first near-70 degree day) we heard somebody outside laugh. Chris looked out the window and asked, “Somebody got a parrot out there?”

He’s starting to really scare me.