The Secret Language of Birds
Music was always the most absolute of things to me. Notes as true as concrete, each one its own picture, like something to be counted on, immovable.
Even in first grade, I could tell when the music teacher transposed the music in our songbook a whole step higher, and I wondered how anyone could make a mistake like that, playing the wrong notes, not the ones written on my page, and I quietly called her stupid, secretly angry that she was doing it wrong, and secretly pleased that it was I who had discovered her error.
Perfect pitch they call it. And it wasn't until some time in high school that I learned it was different. Who knew that everyone didn't hear that way, didn't pick perfect tones out of thin air on demand?
My father, when he could still hear them, could tell each kind of bird by its song. Not just a few. Hundreds of them. He kept a list of any he had ever heard. And when he sat at the supper table, one day around first or second grade, and told his parents and five older brothers and sisters they were listening to a white-throated sparrow, they laughed, as if that secret were far too great for their small brother.
Does he ever remember not knowing that secret language of birds, I wonder? They say that perfect pitch is inherited. I once tried to test my father's pitch to see if that were true, but he had no language for the notes I played, and he stood at the piano and smiled at my trying, like I had once seen him smile at a city person in the barn reaching for an empty pail of milk, until I gave up. He heard in tones that only made sense to God and him.
I imagine it is as if each dead stalk of weed at the edge of the field, each fence post, each decaying pile of brush could hold a private sanctuary, love poured out. and even when the snow covers the uneven clumps of plowed field, the voices of the birds must pull what's good and light from the ground and from behind the trees, until even the air is thick enough with it to wrap around you. Alone in the fields, in the woods, what good could that be to anyone else but him?
And me, with a voice so thin and small, I could hardly produce a tone that anyone would recognize, so small that at my conservatory audition the professor looked up from her notes to see if I was opening my mouth, as I stood behind the piano lost in the uselessness of hearing a perfect tone in my head, so disconnected from the one that comes out of my throat. What good was a perfect tone to a piano player? Except wrapped in the center of that perfect tone, when everything is right, it seems I could hear the heart of God.
What had God poured out, like wasted perfume, on a vessel for whom it seemingly has no use? Except to Him. The secret language of birds. Who else would spend such beauty, just for the joy of sharing it? Love, poured out, wasted for the pleasure of loving us, utterly useless, except to prove the genuineness of it. A language we will know, even when our ears have grown past the age of hearing, wrapping us in the heart of God.
Even in first grade, I could tell when the music teacher transposed the music in our songbook a whole step higher, and I wondered how anyone could make a mistake like that, playing the wrong notes, not the ones written on my page, and I quietly called her stupid, secretly angry that she was doing it wrong, and secretly pleased that it was I who had discovered her error.
Perfect pitch they call it. And it wasn't until some time in high school that I learned it was different. Who knew that everyone didn't hear that way, didn't pick perfect tones out of thin air on demand?
My father, when he could still hear them, could tell each kind of bird by its song. Not just a few. Hundreds of them. He kept a list of any he had ever heard. And when he sat at the supper table, one day around first or second grade, and told his parents and five older brothers and sisters they were listening to a white-throated sparrow, they laughed, as if that secret were far too great for their small brother.
Does he ever remember not knowing that secret language of birds, I wonder? They say that perfect pitch is inherited. I once tried to test my father's pitch to see if that were true, but he had no language for the notes I played, and he stood at the piano and smiled at my trying, like I had once seen him smile at a city person in the barn reaching for an empty pail of milk, until I gave up. He heard in tones that only made sense to God and him.
I imagine it is as if each dead stalk of weed at the edge of the field, each fence post, each decaying pile of brush could hold a private sanctuary, love poured out. and even when the snow covers the uneven clumps of plowed field, the voices of the birds must pull what's good and light from the ground and from behind the trees, until even the air is thick enough with it to wrap around you. Alone in the fields, in the woods, what good could that be to anyone else but him?
And me, with a voice so thin and small, I could hardly produce a tone that anyone would recognize, so small that at my conservatory audition the professor looked up from her notes to see if I was opening my mouth, as I stood behind the piano lost in the uselessness of hearing a perfect tone in my head, so disconnected from the one that comes out of my throat. What good was a perfect tone to a piano player? Except wrapped in the center of that perfect tone, when everything is right, it seems I could hear the heart of God.
What had God poured out, like wasted perfume, on a vessel for whom it seemingly has no use? Except to Him. The secret language of birds. Who else would spend such beauty, just for the joy of sharing it? Love, poured out, wasted for the pleasure of loving us, utterly useless, except to prove the genuineness of it. A language we will know, even when our ears have grown past the age of hearing, wrapping us in the heart of God.
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