The Lost Language Of Chirps

It's come to this. Most of my friends have hearing aids. The rest don't know what they're missing. We get to hear utensils drop in restaurants, highly amplified. We also are treated to closed captioning not only for what is being said by humans but for howls and snarls of lurking beasts as well bird's honks, hoots, twirps and chirps. Not that we hear them but we are told they're happening.

Birds chirping seem to be the obligatory opening lines for detective stories set in bucolic England. It translates to, You'll never guess what's about to happen in this quaint Cotswold village. If nameless birds aren't chirping then gulls must be screeching. I prefer the chirp where I can be lulled into somnambulance. 

If the scene is set in Brooklyn we might get boids choiping particularly on Turd Avenue and Turdy-Turd St. Then we’re in for 90 minutes of crooked cops, back alleys, a topless dancer going to night school for a law degree and a car chase destroying a dozen fruit stands and pushcarts. Is that a chirp or a garbage truck backing up?

However nothing compares to the sunny hamlets with thatched roofs, riddled with crime and no one does it as well as the Brits. Their supply of detective stories is inexhaustible. Tough-gentle, scruffy-clean cut, oversized-frail, alcoholic-teetotalers, clergymen, classicists, hard or soft-boiled.

People with fully functioning ears may not know that a chirping bird is often sufficient to set off a mild-mannered septuagenarian on a killer rampage. Who knew what evil lurked behind those bake sales and cricket matches? Maybe it was the white suits that drove Fitzroy Fitzmorris to plot the demise of the former Lieutenant of the 3rd Fusiliers and local headmaster.

For the first 40 minutes every one of the eleven suspects interviewed tells whooping lies. As the truth is grudgingly revealed it becomes clear, from the couch, who the murderer is…..only to be dashed as his body turns up bludgeoned with a fire iron. 

Suddenly each face changes, birds stop chirping and crows start cawing accompanied by organ music. The Detective Inspector overhears a conversation at the pub and has an epiphany. Everyone is to gather in the library. He methodically eliminates the culprits one by one until……..yes, we say, he didn’t fool me for a minute. It is, of course, the retired benign viscount whose cunning chess moves are played, in human scale, out on the village green. The inspector then returns to take tea with his perfect wife and birds can be heard chirping once more.

Of course, the chirping birds knew all along who did the dastardly deed. If we were fluent in the lost language of chirps we could have saved ourselves all this sleuthing.

The formula, set in Albion stone, is reaffirmed. Order has been restored. Truth will out. The gardens are untrammeled. Songs can be heard from the pub. On the lawn of the manor house a croquet ball has been hit squarely through a portal. We shall, for reasons unknown, sleep well tonight.

Deprived are those without captioning. They have to do their crime-solving without benefit of bird calls. Only we hearing impaired get to know that birds are chirping once again.