Until I moved to the city, I thought blue jays were a rare bird. I’m not sure why I felt they weren’t around often, but I remember Mom’s excitement when one flew through the backyard. When I was a child, she would sing me her modified version of “Zip-A-Dee-Do-Dah” while I was bathing, scooping water to rinse the shampoo out of my hair, and trilling: Mr. Bluejay on your shoulder…and I felt him there, the blue jay, on my shoulder as she sang those words.
Maybe it was her enthusiasm that made me notice the blue jay sightings. Mom would mark each jay she spotted on the refrigerator calendar, a thin blue line with a felt-tip pen. Dad, on the other hand, saw many rare birds flying through the garden and never said a word about any of them—not even the Baltimore eagle—until the moment was long gone. From his armchair, he once claimed to have seen a forest tree plant land on the trunk of the mountain ash tree in the garden, a tree whose branches brushed against our living room window. In the summer, its leaves seemed to reach for the television, on the other side of the glass of which CNN was on 24 hours a day. Dad had planted the mountain ash tree when we moved in, 20 years ago, and it’s still growing. One spring, a robin staked out its territory, built its nest, and fed its young right next to Anderson Cooper’s talking head. That’s when Dad started to notice.
He once got us tickets to a Blue Jays game, the highlight of a trip to Toronto that was planned before a global pandemic shut everything down. Instead, I got Dad in his Bautista jersey, sunk deep into his recliner with his bacon sandwich and commentary, most weekends until I moved out. It was during a Blue Jays game that Dad also suffered his stroke — after dinner, after wandering into his recliner to watch Bichette run the bases while real Blue Jays scurried by outside.
On the phone to 911, I rattled off my parents’ address while Mom tried to get Dad to stretch his arms straight out in front of him. Tell him to say, “The early bird catches the worm,” ” the dispatcher urged, and I stared into Dad’s sleepy eyes and insisted that he repeat it after me. I can’t do thathe babbled, and then the blue jays gathered in the tree as if cheering him on. They peered through the window at Dad, who kept saying: I’m fine now, I’m fineas if the stroke had just flashed through him and then disappeared again. An ambulance is on the waythe dispatcher said, and the blue jays stayed there in the rowan tree until the screeching of the sirens drowned out their own little noise. I saw Mom glance at the refrigerator as the paramedics pulled up. I hurried to meet them at the door as she put six blue check marks on the calendar.
About the author
Katherine Abbass (she/her) is a queer writer of Lebanese descent. Her work has been published in several literary magazines across Canada, including Room, The Malahat ReviewAnd egg yolkKatherine has been nominated for two Alberta Literary Awards and an Alberta Magazine Award and won the 2021 Riddle Fence Fiction Contest.
This article appears in the September 2024 issue of Edify