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 much, but I remember Mom’s excitement any time one flew through the backyard. When I was a kid, she’d sing me her modified version of “Zip-A-Dee-Do-Dah” during bath time, scooping water to rinse the shampoo from my hair, trilling, Mister Blue Jay on your shoulder… and I’d feel him there, the blue jay, on my shoulder when she sang those words.
Maybe it was her enthusiasm that made the blue jay sightings stand out to me. Mom put a little tick on the fridge calendar, a thin blue line of Sharpie, for every jay she spotted. Dad, on the other hand, saw many rare birds fly through the yard and never said a word about any of them — not even the Baltimore oriole — until the moment was long past. From his recliner, he once claimed to have seen a brown creeper land on the trunk of the mountain ash in the yard, a tree whose branches grazed our living room window. In the summer, its leaves seemed to reach for the TV, where CNN played 24/seven on the other side of the glass. Dad had planted that mountain ash when we moved in, 20 years ago and still growing. One spring, a robin staked her claim, built her nest, and fed her babies right alongside Anderson Cooper’s talking head. It was then that Dad started noticing.
He got us tickets to a Blue Jays game once, the highlight of a trip to Toronto planned before a global pandemic shut everything down. Instead, I got Dad in his Bautista jersey, sunk deep in his recliner with his bacon sandwich and his commentary, most weekends until I moved out. It was during a Blue Jays game that Dad had his stroke, too — after dinner, after migrating to his recliner to watch Bichette run the bases while actual blue jays flitted by outside.
On the phone with the emergency dispatcher, I rattled off my parents’ address while Mom tried to get Dad to hold his arms straight out in front of him. Tell him to say, “Early bird gets the worm,” the dispatcher urged, and I stared Dad in his sleepy eyes and insisted he repeat after me. I can’t do that, he slurred, and it was then that the blue jays began to gather in the tree as though rooting for him. They peered through the window at Dad, who kept saying, I’m fine now, I’m fine, like the stroke had merely flitted through him and was gone. An ambulance is on its way, the dispatcher said, and the blue jays stayed there in the mountain ash until the screech of sirens grew to overtake their own little racket. I saw Mom glance over at the fridge as the paramedics pulled up. I hurried to meet them at the door while she added six blue ticks to the calendar.
Katherine Abbass (she/her) is a queer writer of Lebanese descent. Her work has appeared in several literary magazines across Canada, including Room, The Malahat Review, and yolk. Katherine has been nominated for two Alberta Literary Awards, an Alberta Magazine Award, and in 2021, she won Riddle Fence’s Fiction Contest.
This article appears in the September 2024 issue of Edify
