Loquacious: "Bird" by Karen Dietrich
Wednesday, March 13, 2013 at 3:36PM 
Loquacious: full of excessive talk : wordy (www.m-w.com)
Loquacious is a "wordy" series that revels in language. Read more essays in the series here.
Today's guest essay was written by Karen Dietrich, a real, live writer who lives right here in my town! Until recently I've had very little local creative community, but that is slowly changing thanks to another local writer (who you'll meet in a future Loquacious column) who introduced me to Karen. In addition to being a poet, writer, and professor, Karen is also one-half of the music group Essential Machine. And in a werid twist of local connection, we discovered that she worked with my husband at Blockbuster Video about 15 years ago. I'm glad that our paths have crossed again, and I'm pleased to bring you this engaging and vivid essay about her run-in with "bird."
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Bird
By Karen Dietrich
I still remember the tape recorder – it was silver and black, and from the Sears Catalog my sister Linda and I prized. Sprawled on the shag carpet, we routinely circled our desires on those four-color glossy pages. The tape recorder had been a gift for Linda on her eighth birthday. I was five years old, a smaller shadow following longer shadows around the neighborhood.
One afternoon, while Linda was in school, I stole the tape recorder from its hiding place under her bed and ran to the basement, where everything was amber with paneled walls and mounted deer heads. Into the pinprick holes of the recorder's microphone, I played Olivia Newton-John's Greatest Hits from the turntable, announced each song like a DJ, the plastic buttons smooth on my fingertips as I hit record, stop, rewind.
The problem was the playback, the sound of another girl in the room. Surely it wasn't me. I ran upstairs to my mother, played the evidence for her, certain the machine was defective – a loose component, a malfunctioning red and black wire deep inside. My mother laughed, then gave me a pat on the head, my dark hair parted taut down the middle, two identical braids dangling below each shoulder.
"That's not me!" I told her. "That's not my voice."
"But it is you, of course," she said. "You just can’t say words with er sounds."
"Yes, I can. Test me," I said. I was a diligent student, a lover of assignments and tests. Memorization thrilled me, and I had a knack for it. Mind like a steel trap, my father said.
"Say bird into the tape recorder and play it back. You'll see what I mean," my mother said, and went back to her housecleaning, her hands forever hidden in buckets of soapy wash water.
I locked myself in my pink bedroom and recited the blackbird verse I remembered from a book of nursery rhymes:
Sing a song of sixpence a pocket full of rye,
Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie.
When the pie was opened the birds began to sing,
Wasn't that a dainty dish to set before the king?
When I played it back, I realized my mother was right. I couldn't say bird. My version sounded more like board. I said bird over and over into the silver and black tape recorder, hoping that eventually the playback would match what I thought I was saying.
I began avoiding the words I couldn't say correctly, and for the most part it was a success. Bird was the only difficult one. Although I now hated the word, I loved the creatures intensely. I loved watching robins gather in our yard. I loved watching sparrows assemble nests in the porch roof gutters, their small tufts of grass and twig peeking from the eaves. The previous spring, a bird had made a low nest in our dogwood tree. Three speckled eggs had hatched into small alien-like babies, necks stretching to reach the fresh worms their mother dangled above them. I promised myself to never speak of birds until I fixed my speech problem.
And with that promise, birds were suddenly everywhere. There were Cardinals in coloring books, and black crows on Saturday morning cartoons. There were blue jays on the hidden picture page of Highlights Magazine, sweet birds sleeping in the hem of a boy's pant leg.
One year of speech therapy eventually cured me. My therapist's name was Karen, too. She gave me stickers for progress – metallic, puffy, or scratch-and-sniff. I pressed them inside the front cover of my workbook, a softbound edition of speech exercises. Karen had discovered the source of the problem. It was my tongue – it didn't know to anchor itself to my top molars while making the er sound. In the evenings, I practiced speaking into my pink Holly Hobby hand mirror, watching my lips and tongue, saying bird over and over into the air, letting my sound take flight.
Bird reminds me of hate and love and the desire to make something beautiful. Bird reminds me of language and emotion and how they swirl into memory, a seemingly endless spiral. Today, when I say the word, it's always like singing, like birdsong.
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Karen Dietrich is the author of a memoir, The Girl Factory, forthcoming in October 2013. Her poems and essays have appeared in Pittsburgh City Paper, The Bellingham Review, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and elsewhere. She lives in Greensburg, PA. Find Karen online at KarenDietrich.net.
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