We've had George the parrot for thirty years and he won't shut up unless he wants to. Parrot's prerogative. But sometimes I say, "George, if you don't pipe down, I'm gonna . . ." George cocks an evil eye, as if to say, "Yeah? What?"

There's really not much you can do. We have a hallway with a door leading to it and guests who stay in the room above the hall say there are ghosts that wander around there all night. The hall is always dark, day or night. We put George in the hall and close the door. He cries like a baby for a moment. Then gets quiet. Once, when I let him out of the closed hall, he said, "It's about time."

George is a talker, and like Karl's owl, a squaller. He can turn a room upside down with his caterwauling. (If you don't know what that means it's "catter wailing" or a cat carrying on at night; or perhaps a discombobulated owl. Oh, I don't know, you have to be here to know how much noise George can make.)

One time George was making so much noise, I told him the joke about the noisy parrot. The one where the owner says, "If you shoot your mouth off once more, I'm sticking you in the freezer." The parrot hollers bloody murder. The guy throws him in the freezer which is full of frozen chicken parts. A couple seconds later the owner feels sorry for the poor bird and opens the freezer. The dazed parrot steps out covered with frost, and says, "What did that other guy do?"

George didn't think the joke was funny. When I got to the end, he said, "Yeah?" Like it was supposed to have a better, or at least, a funnier, ending. He's pretty quick. Once I was on the phone with a telemarketer and I'd had it with the wheedling and the conniving, and I said, "I'm going to hang up on you!" I did, too. After which, I said -- "What a jerk!" George eyed me from across the room and said, "You're the jerk!"

Sometimes, however, George is quiet, and for all the right reasons, and none of them threatening. Two relatives of mine showed up at the house yesterday. The father, Herb, was a cousin I hadn't seen for forty, no, fifty, years. His daughter Cindy, well, I'd never met her before. It was a special occasion and my wife Lorry made the best egg salad in the world. Everyone said so. I gave some to George. I put a scoop in his bowl and said, "If you eat eggs, you're a cannibal." George looked at me, then he dug in.

After our guests left, I said to Lorry -- "It's really fun having friends for lunch."

Across the room, George said, "Cannibal."

My friend Karl has a way with words. I have been listening to him tell stories since I was a small boy. Today, he's 94. But he doesn't look it. He moves slow. But going down the stairs, and tricky, narrow stairs at that, he never holds the rail as I do, as everyone else does. Karl's stairs, the ones in his ancient house, are made like ship's stairs -- they go straight down.


Karl is a bit of a poet. The kind of poet I like best -- he acts out his poems and he says his words so that they are as sweet as maple sugar, or better yet, maple syrup. And speaking of maple syrup, we had some, Karl and I. At the Roadside Store in Monterey where you get a blueberry buckwheat pancake as big around as a hubcap and, well, the amount of syrup is your business. But I favor lots of it. We were celebrating Karl's 94th birthday two days ago when he looked up at me and said a poem about a storm so terrible it was almost unthinkable. And in the midst of the storm there are two people: a ship captain and his daughter. Of course, they are in what appears to be a sinking ship.

Now Karl gazed at me over the steam of his hubcap size pancake, and as if that trail of steam were the storm, he began to recite these lines --

We are lost! the captain shouted,
As he staggered down the stairs.

But his little daughter whispered,
As she took his icy hand,
"Isn't God upon the ocean,
Just the same as on the land?"

Karl didn't remember the rest of the poem as well as I remember the delicious pancake at the Roadside Store, but I will always remember the way he said the words, the way he shaped them like an actor and gave wind to the sails of the poem.

I looked it up. The poem is called Ballad of the Tempest by James T. Fields. It's an oldy, like Karl. But also like Karl, a goody. Karl asked me, later that day, if students still recited poetry in school, and I said I didn't think so. Gone, too, the oral report where you stood up before the class and talked about electrostatic generators or red efts or even the life and times of a man like Karl.

Karl told me, "I was six when the war was over."

"Which war?"

"Why, the first World War, of course," Karl said.

And then he sang that old song of WWI, "Over There".

Karl's singing is sort of like very melodious talking. Talking with a tune, but not so heavy on the tune. He really lets you hear the words. Sinatra did that. And Johnny Cash. And Karl.

That night, while staying in Karl's house nestled in the snug Konkapot valley alongside the twisty Konkapot river, deep in the ticktock heart of the old Berkshires, I heard an owl. A common barred owl, I thought. At first, it seemed to me this owl had heard Karl sing and now he was going to do his own madcap version of Ballad of the Tempest.

I don't know if Karl was awake to hear what that owl did. But I'm telling you, it was downright devilish. The creature twittered and barked and bellowed and screamed and whined and whistled -- but nary a hoot. Not one. This was an unowlish owl that sounded so much like a coyote, that next morning, I looked up barred owls in a book because I thought maybe it was a coyote and not an owl at all.

No, it was an owl. A barred owl. Just like I thought. The book, The Nightwatchers stated that these owls make many idiotic cries along with a noise than can only be described as "uh-huh, we-ay-houk". The owl's call was described as a foghorn. The author Angus Cameron also said, you might hear "...gabbles, squeals, screams, and harsh, raucous mutterings ...sounds like a battle to the death between nameless, unimaginable demons."

I asked Karl at breakfast if he'd heard the owl. "Not last night but I've heard him," he said, pointing to a fencepost in back of the kitchen. Then he looked at me, and seeing I hadn't slept a wink, said in his most melodious voice, "We are lost, the captain shouted, as he staggered down the stairs."

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