Listen to the Mockingbird

IN MY BACKYARD is the greatest gift Texas can bestow on one of its residents, especially at this time of year. Not a swimming pool. A mockingbird.

Swimming pools, though nice, aren’t free. They cost a lot of money to build, and more money and work to maintain. Better than owning a pool is having a friend who owns one and invites you over on hot days.

Mockingbirds, on the other hand, are free—so free that you can’t even choose to have one. They choose you. I wish I knew how they make their choices.

I lived for a time in a place surrounded by beautiful trees, a sort of Walden Pond without water. One of the reasons I moved there was that I thought at least one mockingbird must live somewhere amongst all the lush foliage. Dozens of squirrels did, and a raccoon, several bluejays and cardinals, and, for a time, a black goat.

And grackles. Oh Lord. Sometimes thousands of them were whooping and hollering like the customers of the Texas Tea House on a Saturday night and befouling my stairs and my car and anything else they thought I might care about.

But never did I hear the mockingbird’s song or spot his white-striped gray wings fluttering through the green.

Then I moved to a more typical North Dallas neighborhood, where sticks with five or six leaves on them are considered trees and anything that grows taller than a man is a wonder of nature. And I awoke one morning and discovered myself blessed. A mockingbird was singing outside my window.

There’s no mistaking a mockingbird’s song, and to compare it with any other is to do the mocker injury. While lesser birds do their best with the few notes at their command, the mockingbird’s voice ranges over the whole musical landscape—dark and brooding as Beethoven or Mahler at times; at others as crystal bright as Vivaldi or Mozart; sometimes as raucous and lusty as Leadbelly.

Whatever his moods or mode, there’s no confusing him with any other bird, for his virtuosity floods the air like rain, reducing the sky’s other musicians to apprenticeship roles, even triumphing over the cars and motorcycles that roar along my street.

Lying abed and listening that first morning, I remembered the last mocker I had heard, last year during a soft summer night in the Davis Mountains. I had heard or read that a mockingbird sometimes sings all day and all night without ceasing and never repeating himself. I don’t know how long this one had been at it, but it was near midnight when I stepped into the yard and after 2 A.M. when I went to bed, and there was no hint of weariness or boredom in him yet. He ranged from meditative sonatas to labyrinthine fugues to bombastic proclamations, while nocturnal hunters fluttered mutely after their flies and gnats and meeker bird souls huddled among the dark branches, probably wishing to God he would shut up, but afraid to complain.

The next morning he was still there, perched at the top of the same old elm, as vainglorious as before. I wondered if he ever slept.

My Dallas mockingbird apparently takes a siesta in the heat of the day. Or maybe he’s just more considerate than his country brother. He’s silent during the torrid hours, when man and beast and bird are seeking shade and coolness and quiet, saving his song for an attentive audience.

On weekend mornings when the weather is right for brunch on the patio, he performs from some place in the alley near our fence, so my lady and I need not miss a single note while at table. We have our eggs and wine to the melody of our own tiny chamber orchestra.

And in the evening, when the sun has gone behind whatever horizon it can find and its light has lost its ferocity, the mockingbird perches atop a utility pole across the street—surely the highest point in the neighborhood—in such a way that his trim profile is silhouetted against the orange and blue darkening sky.

There, as he watches the light go and night come, he meditates. His soft, musing music is in the lower registers—cello and double bass and French horn, as opposed to the violins and trumpets of the morning. And I imagine him in a sweet, melancholy frame of mind, regretting missed opportunities, mourning lost loves, contemplating death and eternity.

It’s at those times that I almost think I understand the mockingbird and his choices, why he prefers the solitary elms in West Texas and a North Dallas utility pole to the translucent green tunnels of the woods.

The woods are too small and close to contain his music and his thoughts. Only the sun and clouds and moon are setting enough for his performance. Only the great blue dome itself is stage enough for his magnificence.

It’s the sky he needs.

July, 1979