Well, it finally happened to us: we got chickens. (It does sound like a disease, doesn’t it? Like it wouldn’t surprise you at all if one day your doctor handed you a pamphlet entitled “Your Chickens and You,” inside of which you’d find such encouraging information as, “Eighty percent of adults in the United States will have chickens at least once in their lifetime,” and “Having chickens does NOT make you a farmer.”)
My son, Clyde, has wanted to get chickens for a long time now—ever since 2007, when we went to Africa. Yes, that was his favorite part about Africa: the chickens. It never failed: we would drive through the middle of a herd of elephants and Clyde would hardly bat an eye, but as soon as we got to a village with a few chickens running around he couldn’t have been more engaged. The same was true when we took him to Europe: somewhere I still have a picture of him crouched beneath a magnificent Dutch windmill, gazing rapturously at a nearby chicken. I can only be thankful that chickens are (apparently) not welcome at the Eiffel Tower or at the British Museum—we had his full attention there.
With such devotion to poultry kind, you probably think it’s cruel of us to have denied Clyde his passion for so long, and perhaps you’re right, but there was one very important thing stopping us from giving in to Clyde’s requests for chickens for all of these years, one obsession in the house that was easily as strong as his love for the bird, and that was my own, equally powerful, hatred for all things chicken.
In my defense, I must say that I came by my hatred honestly: when I was Clyde’s age we kept over a hundred chickens so that we could sell their eggs to local health food stores. Because the eggs were “free range” this meant that the chickens were allowed to roam over our property at will; this was great for keeping the bug population down, but not so great if you ever wanted to walk across the yard barefoot, or sit in a chair without thoroughly checking it first for “chicken leavings.” Also, because we sold our eggs as “fertilized,” we had a rooster named Henry that was the terror of the neighborhood in general, and me in particular. Many was the afternoon I spent trapped inside of my own house, waiting for Henry to go around back so that I could make my escape via Schwinn.
Of course, this all changed the day I finally screwed up my courage and stood up to him—never mind the fact that my version of “standing up to him” was to sneak up behind him with a broom handle while he wasn’t looking and swing for the back of his head like I was swinging for the bleachers. Unlike my time on the baseball field, however, this time my aim was true, and I knocked him out cold. You might think since—as far as Henry was concerned—the blow came from out of nowhere he would have been more likely to have found religion than to fear me, but somehow he knew who it was who had struck him down without warning, and we understood each other perfectly from that moment on.
Hopefully, with Clyde’s chickens it won’t come to that: for one thing they are guaranteed to be “sexed,” meaning that they are all supposed to be females. For another thing, I’d like to think that with age I have developed the ability to meet my problems head on, and not sneak up behind them and beat them with a stick. I guess time will tell on both issues.
In the meantime, it probably wouldn’t hurt pick up a few broomsticks.