In 1956 Phoenix, Arizona, was a city with boundless blue   1  . One day as I walked around the house with my sister Kathy’s new parakeet （小鹦鹉）on my finger, I wanted to show Perky what the sky looked like. I took him into the backyard, and then, to my horror , Perky flew off. The enormous, blue sky swallowed up my sister’s blue  2    and suddenly he had gone, clipped wings and all. 
I told Kathy about Perky's disappearance and I was anxious that she would blame me. But , unexpectedly, Kathy managed to   3   me. With fake optimism, she even tried to convince me that Perky would find a new    4   . But I was far too clever to   5    that such a thing was possible.
Decades later, I watched my own    6   growing. We shared their activities, spending soccer Saturdays in folding chairs with the   7  of the kids’ friends, the Kissells. The two families went camping around Arizona together. We became the best of friends. One evening, the game was to tell Great Pet stories. One person claimed（宣称） to  8   the oldest living goldfish. Someone else had a psychic dog. Then Barry, the father of the other family, took the floor and ___9___that the Greatest Pet of All Time was his blue parakeet, Sweetie Pie.
"The best thing about Sweetie Pie," he said, "was the  10    we got him. One day, when I was about eight, out of the clear, blue sky, a little blue parakeet just  11    down and landed on my finger."
When I was finally able to  12  , we examined the amazing evidence. The dates and the locations and the pictures of the bird all  13 . It seems our two families had been  14   long before we ever met. Forty years later, I ran to my sister and said, "You were  15  ! Perky lived!"

A．lake B．sky C．parakeet D．backyard

A．pleasure B．sadness C．treasure D．sense

A．forgive B．comfort C．help D．delight

A．parent B．home C．nest D．fellow

A．imagine B．suppose C．doubt D．believe

A．birds B．happiness C．worries D．children

A．parents B．birds C．interests D．games

A．catch B．find C．buy D．have

A．announced B．said C．retold D．hoped

A．day B．place C．way D．story

A．floated B．dived C．settled D．went

A．think B．speak C．interrupt D．explain

A．came up B．turned up C．turned out D．matched up

A．known B．fastened C．connected D．introduced

A．right B．wrong C．silly D．mad