To Kill an American Bird
Since I’m on an animal jaunt, I want to talk about an animal here in the midwest that we don’t have in Ireland.
This is an animal that really irks me.
It’s a bird. A mockingbird.
Aside from trips to this here New World, most Irish people only know of the mockingbird through Harper Lee’s novel.
In To Kill A Mockingbird we hear Gregory Peck Atticus warn his children that, although they can shoot all the bluejays they want, they must remember that it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.
Why you ask? Because, according to a neigbour (of the Finches not me, and by Finches I mean the family in the novel not the birds) it is a sin because mockingbirds do no harm. It is only pleasure that they give us with their songs. They do nothing else. They don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us.
Rubbish. They are mockingbirds. Where do you think they got their name? Do you know what they do?
Alone - they are always alone because, well not because they are territorial and fight viciously over loved ones, no they are always alone because they are the Stars On 45 of the bird world. Once is interesting, like maybe at a cigarette break during a wedding, but thereafter they make as much sense to listen to every day as listening to Jive Bunny.
They mimic the songs of other birds. Think about it. Some birds aren’t that good at singing; that’s why god gave them big beaks to swallow passing flying insects, and no legs so they wouldn’t stop in one place and annoy humans with their awful warbling.
But luckily for us mockingbirds bring back those birdsongs that weren’t good enough to chart first time around. Yes, and they do it loudly and in rapid succession. Oh yes, and that means there is quite a similarity for me when I go for quiet walks at dusk in Kansas City compared to walks in my native Dublin.
Why? Because every evening without fail on an otherwise pleasant walk under a multi-coloured Missouri sky, I get to hear a lone mockingbird high on a telephone pole do to the bird world what cars in Dublin do when they are being stloen i.e. race repeatedly and loudly through the Top 20 greatest hits of the car alarm world.
Atticus, you were a good man, but I say leave the bluejays alone and turn your guns on the mockingbirds as if each one of them was your cousin, the cousin who at every family event does that routine where he blends breakdancing with disco. And jive.
Shoot that bunny, Atticus.
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