By Janet Jacobs
The migration parable.
Rathbone Oddbird and his wife, Strident, moved to Corsicana when the economy went south, in other words sometime since 1957. Rathbone was going to cash in on this town’s potential, and Strident liked the idea of small-town life which she had read about in books like “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and “Peyton Place.”
They stayed for awhile, raising two Oddbird children, let’s call them Gooney and Kookaburra. They didn’t settle in like nesters who intend to stay. They didn’t join local activities, such as worm hunting, singing, tweeting or soccer, and they didn’t bother to read the paper to find out what was going on. They thought everything was very boring.
After a few years, their feathers began to ruffle. It was little things at first, the traffic on Seventh Avenue, and the weird shed ordinance. The final straw was when they were told they couldn’t park their cars on the lawn. It’s not that they did it that often, they just saw it as a civil rights issue.
Fed up, they decided to move and took the advice of Horatio Alger to go west. They migrated all the way to Dawson.
Dawson, being Dawson, didn’t delight them either. It was probably the way everyone there likes history, or how the kids are expected to be polite, which Gooney and Kookaburra refused to do over their dead bodies.
In reaction, the whole Oddbird family flew to Hubbard, where a series of encounters with loud dogs and guns sent them scampering to Waco.
Once in Waco, they felt more at home. Here was a bigger town, and they were able to fluff out their tailfeathers and strut the way they wanted. Except they weren’t Baptists, and they felt left out of the birdbath, and soon they began to feel the pressure again.
Mrs. Oddbird, whose chicks had now flown the coop, decided she was an artist and needed a more creative environment. To avoid being henpecked to death, Oddbird agreed to migrate to Austin.
Finally, they thought, we’ll be amongst equals. And Austin turned out to be full of birds of a feather, which is to say, proud, a little snooty and tolerant. They were, however, surprised at how bird-brained people there could be. Also, the traffic in Austin made Corsicana’s Seventh Avenue look like an empty desert after Armageddon.
In Austin, Strident produced three loud and awful paintings and an even worse weaving which Oddbird accidentally used to buff his Beemer, because he thought it was an ugly rag. But they still weren’t happy.
Where could they go where they’d be accepted, where the neighbors were friendlier, and where living wasn’t so complicated, expensive and difficult all the time, they asked themselves. After spending several weeks arguing over the merits of Antarctica versus Luckenbach, they asked their children, Gooney and Kookaburra, and both said “Corsicana.”
So, the Oddbirds came home to roost.
Having a full craw of experience now, they began to share their wisdom with the hicks who had never left because a) they didn’t see the advantage of moving away from mama’s cooking, b) they didn’t see themselves as odd, or c) they weren’t flighty like some birds you could name.
Still, some of the Oddbirds’ advice was sound, like not pooping in your own nest, and the importance of flying lessons for chicks, so they were welcomed home by some of the smarter owls, and eventually rose to the top of the pecking order.
And after their various flights of fancy, and migrations big and small, they discovered what a lot of others have found before them, which is that Corsicana is more tolerant of the occasional odd bird than they thought.
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Janet Jacobs is a Daily Sun staff writer. Her column appears on Sundays.
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