My interest in birds started when I was a child and my mother brought a parakeet into the house.  "Pretty Boy" was a chatterer and would pick up phrases pretty easily.  My brother was and still is a big Yankees fan, so he sat in front of the bird and patiently repeated "Yankees" to try to teach the bird to say it.  Of course, birds pick up what they like and Pretty Boy stubbornly refused to say it.  The year was 1955 and the Dodgers managed to best the Yankees to win the World Series in game 7.  My mother and I got to work and when my brother wasn't around we somehow managed to teach Pretty Boy to say "Dodgers beat Yankees."  You can imagine my brother's reaction when Pretty Boy greeted him with that phrase!  

Over the years we had several different parakeets as pets, and as I grew older and went out on my own I graduated into bigger birds.  I've owned two rose-breasted cockatoos, a sun conure, a macaw and a few African Greys.  Fillmore is the longest lasting, and since they usually live around 50 years in captivity, I expect Fillmore and I to be together until the end and we can go "over the rainbow" together.