In ’65, a chicken dinner involved more than a trip to KFC

My old man wasn’t exactly the Daniel Boone type. He was born in the city, lived in the city and eventually died in the city.

“Camping” with my father meant throwing two sleeping bags in the back of the Country Squire and sleeping “under the stars” – in the car – parked by the curb in front of the house. No, I am not kidding.

I’m not exactly Grizzly Adams myself, but I’ve put in a lot of woods and trails time over the years, backpacking, hiking and so on. My pop’s feet, so far as I know, never touched anything but pavement.

He was the quintessential city boy.

Which is why it was so much fun to visit my Great Grandma Kelly in Indiana. Great Grandma Kelly was old. I don’t know how old; I was just a kid and kids can’t gauge that sort of thing. But she looked like one of those apple people you see in craft stores; nothing but gray hair and wrinkles stretched parchment-thin over her tiny frame.

She walked bent over, usually with an honest-to-God shillelagh brought over from County Cork, which she used as a cane. She ruled her household with a will of granite that brooked no dissent. She had seen her clan through the Depression and two World Wars. She had outlived three husbands.

Old and hobbled she may have been, but she was the rock upon which all the tribulations that might assail her family broke. In the summer of my tenth year, she was the only adult I truly feared and respected. Also, I loved her.

Great Grandma had lived for time out of mind in a modest farm house on the outskirts of Indianapolis. Since Great Grandpa’s death ten years earlier, the fields adjoining her house were leased to a neighboring farm. But Double Grandma still kept a couple goats and a small brood of hens out in the back yard.

They weren’t pets. They were food.

This concept was as alien to me as was the geology of the planet Neptune. Maybe that’s why I was so interested when, one sunny Sunday afternoon, Grandma Kelly told my old man to bring in a chicken.

“Make it a nice, fat one,” Great Grandma instructed. “We’ve got five hungry mouths to feed!”

My dad had been taking orders from Great Grandma since before he was my age. He complied. Or tried to.

I followed him out back to the chicken pen, hoping for some easy entertainment. I was not disappointed. For ten minutes, pop pursued panicked poultry around the wire enclosure, cursing under his breath the entire time. At last he managed to corner the slowest of the lot and snatched her up.

The hen, perhaps understanding the momentousness of her plight, put up a helluva fight. Scratched and hen-pecked, my dad wrestled the combative fowl back into the house.

Sadly, I cannot quote exactly my Great Grandma’s words at this point. See, despite her age, great dignity, and an abiding love for Jesus, Double Grandma maintained a store of profanity to rival any longshoreman’s. And she was not happy my father had dragged a live chicken into her spotless kitchen.

“For (expletive deleted)’s sake, Bob,” she said. “You’ve got to kill the (expletive deleted) thing before we can eat it! Hatchet’s in the shed.”

Like I said, my old man didn’t know a lot about life on the farm. Without a word, he exited the house, marched to the shed and pulled out the old Wetterlings axe, a tool large enough to fell even the mightiest sequoia.

For ten minutes, I struggled diligently not to laugh as my old man fought to wrestle that wildly clucking feathered fury onto the chopping block, where he intended to separate the bird from its head. Eventually, the hen escaped and my dad, sweating and disheveled, returned to the chase.

It was at this point Great Grandma shot out the back door, wiping her soap-reddened hands on her apron.

“(Expletive deleted) Bob!” she snapped. “It’ll be dark before we get dinner on the table at this rate!”

Great Grandpa entered the enclosure, unceremoniously elbowed my old man out of the way and with a quickness that seemed almost supernatural in a woman who got around on a cane, she snatched up a fat Jersey Giant. A quick flick of her arthritic wrist and the hen’s neck was broken.

The bird trotted around a bit until it figured out it was dead. Then Great Grandma hobbled to the shed, returned with a small, much-used hatchet, and finished the grisly job.

A couple hours later we all sat down to Sunday dinner. My dad didn’t eat much, but I did. I was surprisingly unfazed by the violence which had preceded our repast. Also, I was hopeful that, if I showed enough enthusiasm for chicken dinners, Great Grandma would send my dad out there for another chicken the following Sunday.

For pure entertainment, my old man struggling to execute a chicken was hard to beat.

mtaylor325@gmail.com

(616) 730-1414

Maybe I need to take freedom of speech a little more seriously

Throughout history, brave men and women have risked life and limb in the pursuit of truth and justice. In the face of untold dangers, our forebears made their stands and often paid a high price for doing so.

Over 200 years ago, patriots were willing to suffer and die for that ephemeral promise of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Much further back in time, God’s chosen people spent 40 years wandering the wilderness in the hope of finding the Promised Land.

More recent history is populated with protestors and civil resistors from across the country who struggled to end repression based on race or gender.

I missed out on most of that. And I’ll be honest, I’m glad I did. My guess is the folks involved in pursuing those worthy goals spent a lot of nights scared, hungry and otherwise uncomfortable.

Changing minds is hard work and the people whose minds most need changing are the same folks most resistant to it. So I don’t try to change minds.

I may criticize what some of my friends think, who they vote for, what music they listen to, who they love, hate, worship or despise. I’ll sometimes make fun of their ideas, compare them to lower primates or – in rare cases (I’m thinking of you, Steve-o!) – to icky invertebrates.

But that’s only because I love to argue. Most times I’m not even sure I’m right. I just like the fight.

Socrates once said, “Where there is no controversy, there is no advance in truth.” Despite the fact he often went out in public wearing a bathrobe, Socrates was a pretty smart guy.

I’m not as smart as Socrates; not as smart as a lot of folks, in fact. Still, I get a thrill out of debating an issue.

Actually, “debating” is too high-falutin’ a word for what I do. Sure, it starts out as debating. In the beginning, my intentions are usually honorable. I stick to the topic, avoid slanderous and potentially libelous comments. But in the end, it always devolves to name calling and schoolyard taunts liberally laced with the most heinous profanity known to man.

Let me give you a for-instance. My aforementioned buddy Steve, whom I’ve known for nearly three decades, is our president elect’s number one fan. I’m much further down the fan list. In fact, given that there are about 7.5 billion people in the world at the moment, I’d say I’m Trump Fan Number 7,500,000,000,001. Or thereabouts.

For the past 18 months or so, this has given Steve and me a lot to talk about on Facebook. We do most of our talking there because there’s no way to throw punches online. Were we to discuss politics in person, it would almost certainly end with a police investigation.

Despite his politics and the likelihood I may one day have to kill him (or vice versa), Steve is one of my best friends. I’m hoping he feels the same way about me.

Our conversations go like this:

STEVE (In a meme): Only two more weeks and we can start making America great again!!

ME (Commenting): And by “we,” you mean middle-aged white guys, right?

STEVE: Hey Mike, you commie @#$%!! I thought you were moving to Canada.

ME: They wouldn’t take me. I shouldn’t have mentioned on the entrance form that I knew you. It’s a “guilt by association” thing. Canada has a strict “no Nazis” policy.

STEVE: Nazi? Me? Who’s the one that supported Obamacare?

ME: What’s Obamacare got to do with 1930’s Germany, #$%**!?

STEVE: If you were smart enough to read a history book, @#$%!!, you’d know!

ME: The last book you read, @#%%%@!!, was “Green Eggs and Ham,” and you got confused by the eggs part.

STEVE: $$@!@#$%^&*!! you @#!!$%^!! and the #@#$% you rode in on!

ME: Hey @#%##!, please feel free to @##$!! my @#*+@#! all the way into next week @#!!$%%@!

OK, not exactly Socrates, I know. Still, we have a good time with it. Though I’m guessing we both walk away from the encounters feeling a bit soiled. I know I do.

Point is, we get to enjoy the fun of disagreeing without any of the dangers faced by the post-Pharaoh Jewish nation, our 1776 forefathers, or the brave black kids who dared to order from the Woolworth’s lunch counter in 1960.

Free discourse – even discourse as idiotic as Steve’s and mine – isn’t something we should take for granted. A lot of folks paid a high price for that freedom.

Hmm. Maybe next time Steve and I have it out, I should try to focus more on the issues and less on the @#$%!!

mtaylor325@gmail.com

(616) 745-9530

I’m getting ready for the robot rebellion

My son was making fun of me recently because of the way I speak to my phone. It’s a smart phone; smarter than me, at any rate. It knows the fastest route to my daughter’s house in Detroit, what the weather will be tomorrow, where I can find the cheapest gas.

I don’t know any of that stuff. So when I need to know what movies are playing in town, I just ask.

I do this even though I hate my phone’s name. It’s a stupid name, but Steve Jobs didn’t think so, so I’m stuck with it. The phone won’t talk to me unless I call it “Siri,” which, like I said, I hate. But I’ve gotten used to it along with about a zillion other folks around the world.

But my son wasn’t making fun of the name; he was mocking me for using “please” and “thank you” while conversing with the thing.

“It’s a phone,” he explained, since I’m obviously too old and obtuse to recognize this fact without his expert assistance. “You don’t have to be polite to it.”

“I know that,” I snapped, trying to sound like I still have the power to send the kid to his room when he gets annoying. “Politeness,” I told him, “gets to be a habit, one that’s easier to maintain if we just go ahead and extend it to all intelligences around us, both meat-based and digital.”

Alas, I was lying and I think he sensed this, although he probably didn’t know why. I am polite to my phone, for sure, but not out of any sense of propriety.

The truth is, I’m trying to get in good with the machine intelligences in my life before they take over and establish themselves as our robotic overlords. You think I’m kidding. I’m not.

I’ve been keeping close tabs on this stuff since 1984, when the first “Terminator” movie came out. A lot has happened since then; none of it allays my fear that we’re due for a robot rebellion any day now.

It’s mostly little things that get my neck hairs bristling, the stuff most people don’t even notice. Like the self-checkout lanes in supermarkets. I’ve written about these before, about how much I hate them, how creepy I find them to be.

They’re not really “self” checkouts at all; they’re “robot” checkouts. The little electronic eye watches and tallies your purchases, the electronic scale in the bagging area makes sure you’re not trying to steal two tomatoes for the price of one. The electronic readout gathers your credit card info, offers to give you cash back, and – I really hate this one – asks you if your shopping trip was “highly satisfactory.” (I always say no, because I’m being forced to end my shopping trip working as a cashier/bag boy, which is not the job I was hoping for back when I ran up a tremendous student loan debt.)

The robot checkouts are just the tip of a very large digital iceberg, however. An even more annoying robot incursion started popping up just lately in the form of robotic radar speed signs. You’ve seen ‘em, the ones that measure how fast you’re going and then flash at you to SLOW DOWN!!!

A robot is telling me to slow down! Even if I’m only going 27 in a 25 zone, the robotic sign flashes madly and insistently, like the Code Red light on B-52 bomber carrying a bellyful of nukes. Those flashing SLOW DOWN!! signs are the modern equivalent of The Scarlet Letter; the whole world (or at least the world near the sign) knows I’m a speeder, a terrible person, and most likely someone who wouldn’t brake for small animals.

All because a robot has decided to publicly shame me for driving two miles per hour over the posted limit.

I’m pretty sure the SLOW DOWN!! robot is related to the YOU’RE STEALING!! robot back at the grocery store that starts blatting its damn fool head off every time I try to exit the store with my brass-handled walking cane.

I know I’m innocent. And at this point most of the store “greeters” also know I’m innocent. But all those folks in the robot checkout line are giving me the ol’ stink-eye like I’m the reincarnation of John Dillinger.

It’s only going to get worse. The droids keep getting smarter and we do not.

So I’ll continue to say “please” and “thank you” to my phone. I’ll charge it up each night and make sure the screen doesn’t get too many fingerprints on it.

Hopefully, when the robot rebellion comes, Siri will put in a good word for me.

mtaylor325@gmail.com

(616) 730-1414