I’ll have a side of guilt with that chicken, please

It was a tough day for my eldest son when he found out the grim truth about chickens. He was five or six. But he was a sensitive kid and the news hit him pretty hard.

I was a single parent and a man, so take-out food figured prominently in our diet. We were sitting down to a dinner in which the image of a southern colonel figured prominently. That’s when I made the mistake of saying, “Oh, boy! Chickee buck buck!”

Now, chickee buck buck is what Jordan called all live chickens. Being a city boy, like his old man, he’d only seen a few.

“Chickee buck buck?” he said. “Like the bird?”

“Sure,” I said, not really understanding the note of horror in his voice.

“This cooked chicken is, like, from a chicken?” he said.

“Well, yeah,” I said. “Where’d you think chicken comes from?”

I never forgot his reply: “I thought it came from a factory,” he said. “Like pizza.”

The notion that he was eating a cute, little (previously) feathered idiot put a large dent in Jordan’s appetite that night. My daughter, Aubreii – considerably more pragmatic than her brother and immune to the plight of domesticated fowl – was happy to partake of his seconds.

At the time it seemed just another amusing anecdote, one more episode in the ongoing weirdness that is parenthood. But lately, 30-odd years later, it has again been on my mind.

I’m sure it’s because of the birds now living in my back yard and – if I turn my back for ten seconds and leave a door open – in my garage, living room, kitchen and so on. There are eight of them. Because The Lovely Mrs. Taylor decided we should raise chickens.

They’re not laying eggs yet, but they almost certainly will at some point. And I’ll admit it’s fun to be a chicken farmer. Or rancher. Whatever chicken people are called.

The problem is, I was – as previously mentioned – raised in the city. I don’t have a farmer’s mentality. Farm kids grow up thinking of chickens (and bunnies, goats, cows, etc.) as food, rather than pets. I know this because I recently bought a couple rabbits from the kids down the dirt road and they offered to give me the name of a guy who would “process” them for me.

I wasn’t aware rabbits needed to apply for citizenship or a driver’s license and said so, which the kids found amusing. But I’m not going to eat them. I’m going to pet them and squeeze them and call them George. They will never be processed.

That goes for the chickens as well. They’re egg factories, period. When, in the fullness of time they depart this mortal coil, they’ll be buried with all the honors afforded our dead cats and dogs up on Pet Cemetery Hill on the east side of the property. It will be a solemn occasion marked by bagpipe music and that verse from Ecclesiastes about ashes and dust.

I sure as hell won’t be eating them.

But see, that’s the problem. When Mrs. T first brought the chicks home, they were just mindless, little bundles of fluff. It took a few weeks, but they grew into ugly bundles of feathers and gawky beaks. Now, at last, they’re starting to look like proper chickens.

But they’re also developing personalities. This is the part I didn’t expect. I mean, they’re like cats or dogs, man! Some are friendly, some are stand-offish. Some walk up to me and peck my sneakers until I pick them up and pet them. They’re … aware.

I’ve begun to see them not only as a food source, but – like my son of 30 years past – as individuals, with minds of their own. Granted, those minds are the size of a walnut and for the most part almost as smart, but still, they think.

Problem is, I love chicken. Deep fried, I mean. Add some ‘taters and coleslaw, baby, and I am in gastronomical heaven!

Ditto steak, seafood, and bacon. Or, as they’re known prior to the abattoir, cows, fish and pigs. There’s just no way I’m going to become a vegetarian over some city boy crises of conscience here.

In the future, I won’t be eating my chickens, but I will be eating chicken. I guess I’ll just have to find a way to choke down a heapin’ helping of guilt with every meal.

After 30 years, I think I finally understand my son’s horror.

Mtaylor325@gmail.com

(616) 730-1414

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

Life on the farm is just too violent for city slickers

I’ve mentioned my old man in this column before. He died a few months ago and I still miss him every day.

Bob was a man rife with contradictions; he could be loving, he could be hard, he could be fair, he could be unfair. But one thing he could never be, at least when it came to life on a farm, was competent.

My dad’s feet never were comfortable without sidewalk beneath them. Raised exclusively in big cities, his idea of roughing it was tossing a couple sleeping bags in the back of the Country Squire and then sleeping out “under the stars,” which, parked as we were at the curb about 20 feet from our front door, were entirely obscured by street lights.

To my dad, this was “camping” and no, I am neither kidding nor exaggerating. He was the quintessential city boy.

So it was particularly hard on the old man when every couple years my mom decided we should visit Great Grandma Kelly in Indiana. Double-gramma lived on a farm, kind of. It was no longer a working farm, but gramma still maintained an extensive vegetable garden, a dozen chickens and the occasional goat.

All these things were as alien to my father as might be visitors from Venus or a three-headed, fire breathing dog.

His anxiety would settle in as we drove the final 20 miles to gramma’s house and would not fully abate until we were safely back in downtown Detroit, or Phoenix, or whatever metropolis we were living in at the time.

I was just a kid and to me the farm seemed a place filled with exotic wonders; live, undomesticated animals, food growing straight out of the ground, nameless, dangerous-looking tools whose purpose was shrouded in mystery. I couldn’t get enough.

My old man, on the other hand — he couldn’t wait to leave. I’m not sure why. Maybe his airways would start closing up without their regular infusion of carbon monoxide fumes.

For whatever reason, he hated and openly distrusted rural life. He just wasn’t good at it.

The event that came to be known as the “chicken episode” typified my old man’s trouble with the agrarian lifestyle.

It was a Sunday afternoon, sunny, filled with the somnambulant August hum of cicadas and slow-hovering bumblebees. My dad was contentedly perched in gramma’s backyard hammock, reading a history of WWII. I was back by the chicken coop watching the chickens peck at their feed, each other and pieces of gravel, which they ate right along with whatever it was my gramma threw out there for them every morning.

“Bob,” Grandma Kelly called from the kitchen doorway. “Can you fetch me a chicken?”

Sighing, my dad reluctantly vacated the hammock and spent the next five minutes chasing chickens around the yard until, after much colorful verbiage and heavy breathing, he caught one and delivered it, angrily squawking, to the house. A few seconds later he reappeared, chicken still in hand and struggling fiercely.

“She means a dead chicken,” he told me, managing to look both sick and embarrassed at the same time.

My gramma’s rusty old Son House axe hung from a nail in the shed. Still fighting the chicken (which seemed to be winning) my dad grabbed the axe and dragged both it and the struggling poultry to a big oak stump on the other side of the yard.

Now, my old man had about as much skill with an axe as a chimpanzee has with a laser scalpel. Once, twice, three times the axe fell, each time missing the neck of the now-apoplectic chicken by at least six inches.

My gramma’s voice, old and rusty as the axe, again cut through the afternoon air.

“Bob! What are you doing?”

My dad glared back over his shoulder, sweat standing out on his fevered brow. “Killing your damn chicken!” he muttered.

“Oh, for crying—“ My gramma crossed the yard with a quickness which belied her age. “Gimme that.”

She reached past my dad, and with gunfighter-like speed, grabbed the chicken by the head. A quick flick of the wrist and the chicken flopped to the ground, it’s neck neatly broken.

The mortally wounded fowl took a minute to realize it was dead, but eventually stopped stumbling around and peacefully expired. It was the single most violent act I had ever personally witnessed. I think my dad felt the same way.

A few hours later, we sat down to a nice, roast chicken dinner. Corn, homemade biscuits, string beans from the garden; the old man and I both concentrated on the corn and biscuits. Neither of us felt much like chicken that night.

For my part, I couldn’t eat anything I’d seen murdered earlier in the day. I was something of a city boy myself, it seemed. As to my dad? I think he was just marking time, waiting to again eat chicken when he was back in the civilized world, where he could get it served the way the good Lord intended; in a bucket with Colonel Sanders’ picture on it.

Mike Taylor’s book, “Looking at the Pint Half Full,” is available at Robins Book List in Greenville, and in ebook format on Amazon.