Merry Little Notes

"Did you learn to whistle from a man?" the teacher asked me. I served as the aide in her classroom and would sometimes whistle while getting ready for the day. "Yes," I replied, "my dad whistled, and I guess I picked it up from him."

But that was just the near end of the story's thread. In the days of the maxim "whistling girls and crowing hens both come to some bad end," the girl who would grow to become Dad's mother and my spunky grandma donned her big brother's overalls, engaged in BB gun wars, and whistled. I don't know if her father (Great-Grandpa N)whistled, but his sister G. recorded the following in reminisces concerning my great-great-grandmother (who was born in the mid 1800s):

"[Mama] had a high soprano voice and she could also whistle. One time she and another girl had a whistling part in a piece, but the other girl backed out and wouldn't go through with her part. Mama whistled her part in spite of others trying to distract her or get her to laugh. Her brothers F. and B. also whistled a lot, so it must have been a family trait."

I remember my own dad's whistle with pleasure mingled with sadness--pleasure because of its fine gladness and shared connection, sadness because I cannot truly remember its sound. Even while Dad was still living and I heard his whistling often, the sweetness of it could still take me by surprise. It was a spontaneous, joyous thing--not at all raucous or shrill. My last distinct memory of listening to Dad's whistle was on my sister's birthday,three months before he died of cancer. He walked out near the chicken house that day and admired my Silver Spangled Hamburg flock with me. The green lawn highlighted the chickens delicate shapes and bold black and white markings.

In addition to melodies, Dad also whistled bird calls. He taught me the cardinal's, and we used it to hail one another when he came to pick me up at the plant nursery where I worked during high school. My sister and I still use this method to catch each other's attention. Because the only entrance to our upstairs apartment is the downstairs backdoor of our landlords' home, banging on said door may go unnoticed by the one upstairs while disturbing the landlords below. In loo of knocking, therefor, we crane our necks toward the upstairs window and shrill like demented cardinals until the one upstairs comes down, grinning, to unlock the door.

Every family has its melodies in a minor key. In the face of my own, I find the long, airy stream of merry little notes a unique blessing.