BLUE JAYS II

There are times when having a story to tell can be a burden – as much of a burden as not having one. If you have a story to tell and you don’t tell it, it sits on a branch like that blue jay over there, squawking all the time. Even if you feed it peanuts and sunflower seeds, it will scold you for neglecting it because, as they say in Africa, ‘Stories are there to teach us how to live’. If one catches you and you don’t treat it properly, then it will call for reinforcements. They might even go after someone else in your family. Stories are like that. It’s their nature. If we gathered more often to tell our stories in a sacred way, not just haphazardly, not just to a friend or to ourselves, then perhaps the course of the stories – and therefore our lives – would be altered.

For example, I turned to that blue jay on the branch and told it, “Did you know that I love you because your people have transformed my people?” He immediately flew away, after sitting there for a long time. Does that change the story? What if he understood what I said and went off to tell the others? What if he told them, “Guess what? She finally thanked us!” Then again he might have said, “I sat there for the longest time asking very plainly for a snack and all she did was talk to me!” We cannot know what he actually thought or whether he told the other blue jays anything.

But if I tell you what happened, telling it as if he understood perfectly, that he has understood all along and has been responding, then you will see for yourself that it was the Story showing us the way and the blue jay and I were just playing our parts.

It began with the courting male blue jay hurtling into my car, the female jay landing on a patch of curbside grass, spreading her wings in confusion and alarm. I scoop up the bird, wrap it in the old clean towel lying on the back seat, and hold him against my heart, driving home shocked and weeping. He is still warm inside the towel. No blood, no visible injury, the body soft and pliable. My breath lifts the feathers on his neck when I bend my head down to look at him.

The dogs slink over and I tell them what has happened. I tell it as if someone else were responsible, as if it were an accident, as if it were planned, but not by me, as if it might be an offering but I don’t yet know what kind. The jay is iridescent. Even the gray feathers glow. I didn’t know this about grayness, that it could be so luminous. Along with sorrow, my chest fills with the honor of holding it so close. The blue jay story has begun. Or rather, it has taken up residence in my life. I am not a victim or a perpetrator. I am a host. My task is to tend this guest.

The story ebbs and flows. At times, it accelerates. I find a fledgling jay lying dead on the flagstone by the guest room. A plump young bird on my doorstep. A tiny fudge and downy gray feather on the sliding glass door tells the rest of the story. It too, is still warm and pliable. I bury it near the place it died. As I sing to it, the tears catch in my throat. I find a dead jay at the cabin in the mountains, a whole bird, cool and hollow, its desiccated body perfectly preserved by the dry mountain air. All that’s left is a shell of feathers.

The story continues to train me. I learn to tend it: Fistfuls of blue jay feathers on hiking trails and camping spots; walking the dogs with blue jays flitting from branch to branch ahead of me. I leave peanuts in the peeling bark of trees. The following day, the nuts are gone. I leave more. We’re in a conversation. I begin leaving peanuts in my patio. I learn to throw them onto the roof so they don’t roll back down into the rain gutter. Most days, four jays come – two that will eat from my hand. The one that is training me pecks at the window or the front the door if the peanut dish is empty. If I leave the slider open, he hops into the house, calling with his hopeful, shrill reminder until I come with peanuts in my outstretched hand. He is teaching me about bravery, the courage it takes to enter the Abode of a Keeper of Peanuts.

Have you ever felt a wild bird’s talons wrap around your fingers, or his smooth pointed beak peck at the soft flesh of your upturned palm? The blue jay tilts his head and looks at me with alert curiosity, his face an arm’s length from mine. Our eyes meet, two expressions of the Infinite gazing at each other. The Story, embodied, takes us by the hand.

My Liberian friend and brother, the former rebel general, Christian Bethelson, called recently. “I was driving to Sarkonedu,” he says, “where the ex-combatants were waiting. On the way going, I saw a little boy netting a blue jay. I said, ‘Stop the car!’ and got out. The little boy said he wanted the blue jay to cook for his soup. He told me that the people gather grasshoppers and cockroaches and put them out to lure the birds. Then they throw nets over them to catch and eat them. So I asked the boy, ‘How much for that blue jay?’ He said, ‘250 Liberian dollars’ (about $4 US). I bought the bird and told the little boy to use the money to go buy a chicken. Then I released the bird!” Then he says, “I cannot describe the feeling in my heart when I freed that blue jay and watched him fly away!” He pauses, then adds, “And you know why I did it? It was because of that blue jay that ate from my hand at your house. It was so sweet! I remembered the feeling of that blue jay sitting on my hand.”

A few weeks later he calls and says: “Today I took my plate of rice outside to sit and eat. I had forgotten my glass of water, so I went in the house to get it. When I got back outside, there was a flock of blue jays eating my rice. I have never before seen blue jays in Monrovia.”

A bird in hand is worth two in the bush, and more.