Mother’s Day
“Birdies sing” was my first full sentence
My mother was a writer, she noticed these things
According to my mother, I was around a year old and looking out the kitchen window in our White Plains, New York apartment when I uttered two words that would go down in (family) history: “Birdies sing.” Presumably there must have been birds tweeting and I, clearly an observant child, reported this breaking news to my mommy, who seized upon the prodigious pronouncement with the tenacity of, well, a first-time mother.
“It was the first time you had put a subject and predicate together,” she later explained to me, when I was old enough to know how to look up “predicate” in the dictionary.
Now, as far as I know, she had not recorded my three siblings’ first full sentences. What with wrangling two, three, and four little rugrats under the age of seven, how could she? But since I was her first, she had plenty of bandwidth to make note of my every babble and coo, every word-ish sounding utterance, and finally, my highly anticipated and grammatically correct first sentence.
“Off with her head!”
I was an early talker which, according to research, generally portends above-average proficiency in reading and literacy. True to form, while other children were reading Cat in the Hat in the first grade, I was breezing through my mother’s dog-eared, hard-cover copy of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll, and devouring with delight the Queen of Hearts’ impulsive execution orders and other absurdities. The ancient volume had been handed down to my mother from her aunt, so even back then the spine was held together with a Hail Mary and brown duct tape. I still have the book, though the tape — and my general belief in prayer — are long gone.
A prescient pearl
The curious thing (to me) about “Birdies sing” is that I ended up becoming a singer myself; apparently even at that tender age I was drawn to melodic vocalizing. It’s interesting when you can trace your lifelong passions and skills back to their origins.
This was not surprising, given my mother was a writer, pianist and sometime singer herself. So I inherited the lyrical, musical genes. Nature. But nurture played a part as well, as our house was always filled with music. We had one of those “hi-fi” cabinets — an actual piece of furniture with a hidden turntable that took up valuable real estate in our teensy living room next to the baby grand piano. Mostly she played classical symphonies, Rodgers & Hammerstein Broadway cast recordings and Frank Sinatra. Later she discovered Simon & Garfunkel, and the “Sounds of Silence” and other exquisite harmonies wormed their way into my ears. They’ve never left.
To this day, when I hear birdsong I am filled with joy. It is one of the sweetest sounds in the world, right up there with the sound of my own children’s voices, or my favorite humansong. When I awaken in the morning and I hear chirping outside my window, sometimes I’ll say it aloud: “Hey mom…birdies sing.”
I’d like to think she hears me.
