Blue Jay Way

I have decided to post a story I wrote back in 2002. Enjoy:

When the sun first crested the horizon and spilled its thick morning light over my part of the Earth, I woke to find a book on my lap and the blanket I was wrapped in damp with the morning dew. The upside to falling asleep reading on the porch is that you wake to a sunrise that is only matched in mid-fifties Technicolor. It’s even worth the backache you carry with you for the rest of the day.

Searching the mysteriously deep folds that develop in a blanket when you sleep, I located my cigarettes and lit one, thankful of the plastic wrap that some genius decided to put on the pack in case some schmuck should ever fall asleep and wake to find himself covered in morning dew. That first drag is heaven. My nicotine breakfast. After that one, the rest is usually left to burn down on its own. I hold it anyway; it’s a comfort.
Pulling my blanket tighter around myself, I remember taking a minute just to look around and enjoy the view. At that time I lived in North Carolina and it was early August, absolutely the most beautiful time of year there, though some may disagree. Overhead, squirrels chased one-another through the branches of an oak tree, the smallest tinges of orange and yellow and red showing at the edges of its leaves. One of the squirrels dropped suddenly from a high branch, bounced off of the corner gutter of my house and caught hold of the end of a branch less than ten feet from the ground like a little furry ninja. It was so absurd as to make me laugh out loud. Then I saw the cause of the little ninja’s fall. A blue jay had apparently dive-bombed it, perhaps hoping to relieve it of some tasty nut. Three more blue jays swooped down over the next minute or so and, chasing one another through the branches, added some color to the mini Cirque Du Soliel going on in my oak tree.
As I watched them flutter and fly through the tree in what appeared to be a playful game of tag (though was probably closer to a gangland turf-war)<i> Blue Jay Way</i> by the Beatles rose to the front of my mind and I began whistling it. I’ve never been a very good whistler, so whistling to myself doesn’t happen. That is to say, I can whistle well, but only with a good amount of wind. I’m one of those whistlers that are constantly being shushed by their friends. I continued watching them, whistling all the while, but their play didn’t go on very long. Less than a minute into my high-pitched rendition of<i> Blue Jay Way</i>, the birds alit on a branch and each cocked their head, as if listening to something. The song continued playing in my head and so I kept whistling along, hearing the words and music alike on the turntable of my mind. The birds, one at a time, hopped/flew to a branch slightly closer to me, cocking their heads in some weird bird-parody of Christopher Walken once again upon landing. After only a couple of seconds, they flew, nearly all at once, to the railing on my porch, not two feet from my head. They cocked their heads once again and listened. And they watched. When I caught on that their heads were turning, each of them, to look at me first with one eye, then with the other and back again, I stopped whistling.

All at once the blue jays found something else of great interest in their immediate vicinity. As an experiment, I began whistling Frank Sinatra’s <i>Fly Me To The Moon.</i> Two of the birds flew off, offended that a human was in such close proximity to them. The other two stayed but by the time I’d gotten to the last chorus, they showed no interest in my whistling any longer. I stopped. I smoked the last bit of my cigarette, only my second drag of the day. I began whistling again. <i> Blue Jay Way</i> once more. The two on the rail immediately stopped what they were doing, one of them dropping a bug from his beak. I had no idea that “entranced” was a word that I would ever apply to a bird but there it was. The other two came back and they brought a friend.

I began to think that this was quite interesting. Theories started running through my mind. Things to do with harmonics and pitch and their effect on certain animals, remembering that dogs can hear certain frequencies that humans can’t and wondering if perhaps certain kinds of birds have different reactions to a variety of different tones. Then they started whistling. Not the short chirp/squawk that is normally associated with the blue jay. It was the song. All at once they started and in perfect harmony. The blue jays were singing<i> Blue Jay Way.</i>

With a final shocked squeak, I stopped whistling.

They continued. Others came and joined them. They sang parts that I hadn’t even remembered. With the birds singing, the Beatles, by comparison, had all the harmony of a first-grade chorus. Still more blue jays joined in, flying into my great oak tree, now remarkably bereft of squirrels. It wasn’t long until the tree was thick with blue jays, each singing the same song, the same verse, the same note.

I’ve always thought the Beatles song had a remorseful feel to it. The birds, on the other hand, were that remorse given flesh. Flesh and perfect pitch. After nearly fifteen minutes of their musical weeping, the birds stopped. They stopped and didn’t move. They seemed to be waiting for something.

“Well, go on,” I said, unsure if I meant that they should leave or that they should continue singing. They did the former, flying off forlornly, it seemed, one at a time.

All that day I thought of that strange phenomenon. Was it, I rationed, a natural melody that perhaps blue jays sing during a certain time of year or for mating purposes? Something that the Beatles heard and made into a song? That would be an interesting piece of trivia to know. That was really the most viable explanation I could come up with. It took almost four hours before I came up with that rationalization. Later on, when I went downtown for some coffee, I saw the paper.

<center><b>“Former Beatle George Harrison, 58, dies.”</b></center>

I bought the paper and read the article. It contained the expected account of his time with the Beatles, his solo career and certain facts about his search for spiritualism. It also listed some of his better-known achievements. Among them, it said, were several songs he had written, including <i>Something</i>,<i> While My Guitar Gently Weeps</i> and… <i>Blue Jay Way</i>.

After that, I gave up on my theories of the phenomenon that I witnessed that morning. I didn’t want it explained, even if it could be. As far as I was concerned, a man had made a contribution to the spirit of the world and the world, nature itself, had mourned him. I can only hope that I somehow earn even half as good a eulogy.