Mockingbird

This morning on the radio I was listening to this song called “Mockingbird.” I’ve heard it a lot and never was that impressed, but this morning for some reason I paid closer attention to the plot, which is rather intriguing once you begin to delve into the subtext.

What’s happening is that some guy is attempting to impress his girlfriend, or I don’t know, maybe somebody else’s girlfriend--or wife for all I know, by telling her that he’s going to get her a mockingbird; and furthermore, that if the mockingbird fails to function correctly, that he will replace it with a diamond ring. My first thought was that there was no way the girl would fall for it, but that notion didn’t hold up under closer scrutiny, because it was the girl who was singing the song, and telling all her friends about her new bird, all excited like it was a really great thing to have a mockingbird, or maybe because she was confident that the bird wouldn’t live up to its contract, and that she’d be getting the ring after all. I couldn’t believe the audacity of this guy, or that he’d managed to pull it off.

I mean, it’s just a plain old bird, like live out in the yard. Sure, there might be some difficulty in snagging one, but it’d sure as hell be worth the effort to avoid having to buy a diamond ring. Of course, this guy claims that he bought the stupid bird too, rather than catching it, but I find that highly unlikely. He probably made up some huge price he paid for it too, and apparently she went for it hook, line and sinker. You couldn’t pull this off with a woman who knew much ornithology, but I suppose the guy knew that this was not her field of expertise, or else he’d have offered her something else, like a hissing cockroach, that she’d be less likely to know the value of. I called around a few pet shops, none of them had any mockingbirds, and most suggested that if I wanted one I should just go out in the yard and get it out of a bush or something.

This is a pretty old song I think, from a kinder, gentler era when women were more trusting and easier to trick. It’s been my experience that the sophisticated feminists of today are less prone to taking a lot of crap off a guy, and probably wouldn’t fall for something like this. If they were willing to accept a bird at all—which I doubt—they for sure wouldn’t settle for some yard bird, but would demand something like a scarlet macaw, and most likely would turn around and sell it on eBay and then buy a diamond ring with the proceeds. And probably sell some of your stuff too, while they were at it, like your guitar and your camcorder.

I’d like to know why he decided to go with a mockingbird in the first place, and not some other kind of locally-grown bird, like a pigeon. I wonder if he just thought of the mockingbird right off, or if he arrived at it after some experimentation. I bet he’s tried this thing before with other girls, and didn’t get it quite right, so they broke up and he had to get a new girlfriend and take another stab at it.

Here’s what I think happened, is that he just got in a bind one day and had to improvise a present at the last minute, because he’d forgotten some important gift-giving opportunity, probably an anniversary of some sort. Women have the ability to perceive a lot more anniversaries than men can, just like dogs can hear stuff we can’t. Most guys don’t realize that 4 months from the first time you went to a movie together is an anniversary, but it is. So he’s looking around the place for something he can pretend is an anniversary present, and not having much luck, and then he thinks maybe a pet, you know everybody loves a puppy.

Unfortunately, there aren’t any puppies to be had on such short notice, so he grabs up the first thing he can catch, which is, let’s say, a gray house mouse. So he wraps it up with a nice bow, but still he’s not feeling real confident about it, and comes up with this plan where he’ll tell her that if the mouse doesn’t work out for her, he’ll replace it with a sapphire necklace. That he was thinking about the sapphire necklace, and shopping around for one for a couple weeks, but then he saw this mouse and thought it was so cute, and that such a wonderful and unique girl deserved a present just as special as she was, rather than an ordinary old necklace, which is the sort of thing that anybody might use for a 4-month movie anniversary. But then—and this is the man’s genius—he establishes the criterion for determining whether the mouse stays or goes to be something he’s sure the little guy can handle. So he tells her, “And if that mouse won’t run on the wheel I’m going to pick up tomorrow at the pet store, I’ll take it back and swap it in for the necklace.”

Well, of course the mouse can run on a wheel, they’re famous for it. For a couple of days the girl sits around staring at the mouse running on its wheel and trying to determine if this is really in some obscure way an acceptable gift, because she’s probably never had to parse so much bullshit at one time before, but then she thinks “Screw it!”, and packs up and moves to L.A. to become an actress, without even bothering to feed the mouse.

So the guy comes home and sees that the mouse ploy didn’t work and that the mouse doesn't have any food, but still he did get laid a couple of times while she was figuring things out, which is probably better than he would have done with no present at all, so instead of totally abandoning the whole idea he works on perfecting it, and several girlfriends later he’s settled on mockingbirds, with a diamond ring as the backup gift in case the birds keep quiet.

Well, of course the bird’s gonna sing, cause it’s a member of the suborder Oscines of passerine birds, commonly referred to as songbirds, and not surprisingly that’s what they do, is sing. These particular ones are called mockingbirds due to the fact that they don’t write any of their own material, but only do covers of other birds’ songs. I don’t think they mean any disrespect, and they probably should call them coverbirds instead.

And I read somewhere that they don’t do them exactly the same, and each mockingbird has his own style and choice of repertoire. On American Idol they call that “making the song your own.” So if they had mockingbirds on American Idol, which they never do seem to, Paula would say “I felt like you really made that titlark song your own. I loved it.” and Simon would say something like “Paula, you birdbrained slut, that song sucked, and you suck. And Randy sucks, too.” And Randy’d say “Why do I suck? I didn’t like the bird either!” He’d probably call the mockingbird a dog too, cause Randy thinks that a lot of things are dogs that really aren’t.

That sort of harsh treatment is likely the reason you don’t see that many mockingbirds on American Idol, because they’re very sensitive creatures who, as I explained earlier, aren’t really mocking other birds, and don’t particularly appreciate being mocked themselves. (The truth is that even animals that do mock other animals aren’t often receptive to mockery that’s directed at them.) As a matter of fact, mockingbirds are pretty polite as birds go, not like those damn seagulls, for example. About the worst thing they do is to occasionally use copyrighted material without compensating the copyright holder, but that’s a very murky area, legally speaking.

You know, it just occurred to me that maybe those birds got together and decided to call themselves mockingbirds, so that they could contend that their performances were parodies, and get around the copyright issues. I guess those are some pretty clever birds. Not as smart as that guy in the song, though, who’s probably been through 10 or 12 girlfriends by now without ever having to buy any jewelry.

The more I thought about how well that little scheme had worked out for the song guy, the sorrier I was that I didn’t have a girlfriend that I could try it out on. If I had only analyzed this song sooner I probably would have a girlfriend, or at least wouldn’t have spent so much on rings and necklaces trying to keep the ones I had, and could use that money to buy a macaw to keep me company. They can imitate most anything, including human speech, so when I came home from work in the evening it could perch on stuff and mock me while I was trying to watch TV. It'd be almost the same as having a girlfriend.

Unfortunately, I don't have a girlfriend or a macaw, or the money to buy either. However, I do have a roomie who is a girl, and I figured the principle’s the same so I went into the kitchen where Linda was making her breakfast and I said, “You know what, I’m gonna buy you a feral cat.”

“Huh?” she replied, which is fairly noncommittal, but I could tell that I had piqued her interest.

“Yep,” I said, “a feral cat, a really nice one. And I tell you what—if by the end of the week, that cat has not lived up to your expectations, I’ll get out there and cut the grass.”

She was so overcome with emotion she couldn’t even say anything for several seconds, but just stood and looked at me. When she did speak, she tried to conceal how touched she was by feigning a cool, blase kind of attitude, with just a hint of gruffness. You know how some people do, when they have difficulty expressing their true feelings.

“What the hell are you talking about?” she said, but I could tell by the words that remained unspoken between us how much my thoughtful gesture had meant to her. It felt good to bring a bit of joy to Linda’s day, and it wasn’t a major inconvenience for me, as the whole neighborhood’s crawling with feral cats, and I had no intention of actually cutting the grass, no matter what.