J.P. Devine’s newest addition is a cockatiel, Paco, seen March 12 walking back and forth on Devine’s keyboard in his Waterville home. J.P. Devine photo

He was, this morning, somewhere around the bottom of the Christmas tree, the one I bought for $195 at Home Depot just before this year’s celebration of the birth of Jesus and after the absence of She, who would have loved it, and him.

There he is. He’s sitting atop the antique model of the cave/hut that holds the clay model of Mary, the mother of the savior, who brought Jesus into the torturous, chaotic, world. No, not this one, but the one run by the crabby, mean Herod. If you, as I, went to school with the nuns, you would recognize this weary family in the house where a couple of my weary family members spent what may have been our last Christmas in Maine.

No, I thought, was this some kind of off-the-wall Christmas miracle?

With a flurry of wings, my “Christmas” sign of joy flew away to my small statue of the Buddha that sits on a table by my chair.

Allow me to introduce Paco, the new guy in my empty house.

I brought this gray and white cockatiel home to install life into my emptiness where Ms. Kramer, the lovely all yellow cockatiel, suddenly passed away after 27 years.

At first, my daughters considered installing a new dog to sit at my feet. We once were a family with various breeds of dogs, but I nixed that idea straight away.

I walk the streets of Waterville every day, but I dread the idea of crawling out into the cold wind and falling snow of early February for the dreaded “last call” at 11 at night like Emily Bronte’s bereaved Heathcliff looking for the ghost of Catherine on the moors of Waterville. No. No more dogs.

Paco the cockatiel settles down March 12 on a small statue of Buddha at the home of J.P. Devine in Waterville.

So here we are, a creaky old Heathcliff trying to find solace with a new, spunky, miniature pterosaur from 228 million years ago, who soars from room to room before finally settling down on a small statue of Buddha. Have I acquired a devotee of Buddha? Well, not exactly. Paco, I learned, is part of a breed of bird that’s a native of Australia, home of kangaroos and Aboriginals and much bigger birds. He has decided to find love in Maine, and has chosen an image of Buddha to rest his weary wings on.

As the weeks “fly” by, Paco seems to have softened his anxieties and formed a “bird/human” relationship with me. He crawls all over me, “kissing” my cheeks and ears and often closing his eyes as he nestles into my sweater.

Not only that, but he seems to have taken on editorial qualities.

I’ve provided my editors with a couple of pictures of Paco walking back and forth in front of my laptop, picking at the sentences and screaming at certain words. Is he correcting? Or is this She trying to edit?

Can this be true? Are these the editorial eyes of the pterosaur from 228 million years ago, or are they those of one of my old mentors, the great William Shawn, the famed New Yorker editor of the ’50s? Or is She here, beside me, moving my fingers across the keys while still doing what she always did, removing commas and the hated semicolon?

I hope so. I have a world of things to do here in order to get the rest of my life moving to my curtain call.

Paco just stopped and looked at up at me and smiled. Do Cockatiels smile? How does “She” do that?

J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer.