Take these sunken eyes and learn to see

"Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat up people's gardens, don't nest in corncribs, they don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird." - Harper Lee

I was delighted the other day to discover that the squawking outside my bedroom window was a mockingbird. He (she?) sings this four-bar tune in four keys over and over, and I had begun to be the teensiest bit annoyed by the troubling song until it was a mockingbird. Then I fell in love.

I believe my little bird friend's song had a symbolic message for me, not just because his species is the central literary allusion in a book I adore, but because he belongs mostly to the South, and bizarre though it may be, I feel like he may have officially let me in the South for good.

Back in the day when I discovered it's most cool to hate where you live, I fell in love with the South -- or the movie and literary idea of it, at least. Most of my evidence came from Steel Magnolias and Fried Green Tomatoes, and especially To Kill a Mockingbird, and a girl trying to rent my friend an apartment in Provo, who said one of its better features was the hallway's "deep drawers" in the deepest Alabama twang. This was all very mythical and romantic, but then that's something about the South I love too: amid its sordid and proud history, there is a deep mythical presence which I've described religiously before, but it also has a whole lot to do with family and manners and land and fried food.

Here people actually remove their hats when someone mentions the name of Robert E. Lee and they call people Miss or Mr. [first name] and thank you, ma'am and sir, and if you don't say it right, you ain't got no manners or background and you might as well be a Yankee. The South defines itself by its regionalness, by the weather, and by the way you treat your neighbors, sometimes with a wary kindness that may very well be covering up a litany of gossip to come, but an absolute duty to help out nonetheless. That's all very intriguing to me, and I think my secret wish to also be a New Yorker or live in San Francisco has made me look at the whole Southern package from an outsider's clinical, bemused place. Like, aren't they charming at the Winn Dixie eating pink hot dogs and fried vegetables.

But I like to think it's possible that Mr. Mockingbird let me in. I'm not sure it's very realistic, given my propensity for loving incorporated towns and calling the states of my past by their rightful names rather than the reductive "out west." Also, I'm just not born and bred, though I like to imagine you can retain your Western or Yankee roots (the former is probably more possible) and be a Southerner by adoption. That's what I thought I heard the mockingbird say, though he could have been singing out of pity for my wandering self.