It was 6:00 a.m. and I was just outside our back door having my first cigarette of the day. The sky was overcast and the predawn light was just bright enough to view everything in monochrome.
Directly above me in the big oak tree a bird began to call. I won’t say sing, because his unchanging, repetitive call was harsh, almost grating. I first wrote monotonous, but it was not. His call was a multiple tone, the kind of minor-key bottle-neck blues chord that might have been played by Manse Lipscomb on a slack-string guitar.
I couldn’t see him well enough to identify the species, but he was about the size of a blue jay, and – at least from my perspective – he was ungainly, with a head a bit too large for his body.
He continued his cry as the skies brightened, but before I could see him as anything but a silhouette, he flew away.
As he left, I found myself thinking about the Blues.
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