At one time I lived in an ancient apartment building with an elevator so rickety that all of the tenants used the steep stairs instead, except for a little old crone on the top floor, whose knees were past bending. I once helped her wrestle her wheeled cart past the heavy, pinching brass elevator doors, then climbed aboard and helped her wrestle it out again. On the clanking and shuddering ride up, she told me that her daughters usually did her shopping for her, but they were both on vacation, and she’d unexpectedly run out of bird seed.

 

 

Bird seed? Yes, she had three parakeets named Twinkle, Twitter, and Tweet. Would I care to see them?

 

She lived in a light-filled studio apartment with pale turquoise walls, gorgeous 20s furniture, and three antique wire birdcages on poles.

 

Three months later I saw two women hauling down some furniture which I recognized as the bird lady’s, so I asked them what had happened. They told me their mother had died in her sleep last week, and if I wanted anything from the junk pile in her apartment, it might save them a trip down that God-awful elevator.

 

I took these beautiful chocolate boxes, which the daughters assured me they had absolutely no use for. “Maybe if they were still full,” one of them said. “But they’re not,” said the other, “we checked.”