The Peckerless Chicken

Calm down.  It's not what you think.

Just a recollection of simpler times.

I suppose I was 8 or 9.  My paternal grandmother and grandfather lived in a little house surrounded by tall hedges and sat catty-corner to the church. Across the road, train tracks ran beside the house, and, twice a day, an eastbound train rattled by.  An older gentleman in railroad overalls would toss brown paper bags of candy from the deck of the caboose.

The house was a simple two-story.  Reasonably warm in the winter and tolerable in the summer with the windows open and a fan going.   Pa had about a football field commute to his general store and Mammy held down the fort, cooking, cleaning, and taking an occasional break with a Redbook magazine and a Kool.

There was a stretch of bare ground in the back of the house, bordered by the smoke house, the hen house, and a couple of sheds.  But this grassless yard, it was the chickens' yard.  All day long, they clucked and cackled and chased bugs.  I suspect it was a pretty good life for a chicken, certainly a much better life than what current-day chickens have.  And it seemed that for every bug a chicken wolfed down, you'd receive a disproportionately larger amount of chicken poop from the other end.  Which was the source of the endless admonition upon entering the enclosed back porch from the chicken yard, "Wipe your feet!"

Those of you familiar with having chickens know that they weren't pets.  They were your eggs for breakfast and your go-to entree for Sunday dinner.   And though even today I cannot speak to the lifespan of a chicken, I do know that the flock had to be renewed every so often.  And that renewal consisted of bringing in a new flock of baby chicks - a whole boxful that you could spill out into the yard and watch immediately acclimate to life on their own.  Their cluck was just a peep, their cackle was yet to be developed, but they already had a handle on pecking at the ground for whatever there was to eat and commenced to do so "right out of the box," as they say.

I was visiting on a day that a new batch of baby chicks arrived.  Pa Gray rolled up in his old green Chevy truck, fetched a perforated cardboard box out of the bed, and set in on the ground.  He headed back to his store, leaving Mammy and me to gaze down upon a roiling wave of yellow feathers and a symphony of peeps.

All you had to do was tip the box on its side and the chicks proceeded to do what they were supposed to do.  Peck at the ground for feed, seed, and a stray bug or two.  And all the new arrivals did just that.

Except for one.

You see, there was one little fellow who, to put it simply, didn't have a pecker.  At the end of his face was just a hint of keratin.  Born without a beak.  But not without a brain and that brain still registered hunger and the automatic impulse to peck at the ground to find it.  Unfortunately, in his or her case, with no satisfaction.

The baby chick banged its face against the ground a couple of times and then I swear to this day he looked straight up at me, his little black eyes imploring that I help him.

It liked to have killed me.

I asked my grandmother what we could do to help and she just smiled and shook her head.

"We can't help the little fella," she said.  "He was born that way."

I asked what would happen to him.

She told me that the chick would have to adjust or it wouldn't survive.  How it was impossible to change its circumstances.  And if it couldn't figure out how to handle what life had dealt it, it would have no future.

Guess what?

It adapted.  I watched it over the next several weeks and it managed to tilt its head in a certain way and sort of roll the food into its mouth and down its throat.  Same process at the water pan.  It thrived as well as the rest of the flock, and, except for the obvious physical difference, in a few weeks, it was a full-fledged chicken, doing what full-fledged chickens do.

It could have protested and pouted and fumed and cried and screamed till the chickens came home, and it wouldn't have changed a thing.

You may not believe this story; it's your prerogative.  But I was there and, all these years later, it remains one that stuck with me.  And then there are those of you who have already taken that little trip to the dark side and imagined that for all that chick's ingenuity, all it got was a trip to a hot skillet.  Maybe so, but at least it got that far.

As I think about that story today, I think about how resiliency and adaptability seemed to be second nature to our parents and grandparents.  And I can't help but wonder if any of that "took" with us, and, if it did, are we passing it on to our children and grandchildren?  Are we giving them what they need to not only survive, but to prosper as well, when life throws them a curve ball?   When life fails to equip them with what they need to manage life in an uncertain world.

Today is March 29, 2020.  I doubt there is a single person who doesn't know where I'm going with this.  There has not been a time in the history of 99% of the people pecking away on this globe today when it has been more critical that we adapt.  We have to adapt to the horrific problem at hand as well as to a lifestyle that will most certainly be altered in decades to come.  And I doubt it will be an easy transition, but I also know it will be far from impossible. Very likely the quality of the lives of our future generations depends on how creative, cooperative, and adaptable our current society is.   This isn't an invitation to a pity party.  It's just one tiny slice of a lifetime of memories that scratched itself to the front of my brain today.  Don't ask me why because I couldn't tell you.  And I wish for everyone the power to evolve and adapt not just to survive, but to succeed and prosper well beyond any aspirations you may have had before we entered these trying times.  Like that little fellow in my grandmother's back yard, find a way.  It's really that simple.

And I can assure you there's one thing that certainly will not be on my lunch menu today.

The gift

                                                       

A friend gave me a pencil recently.  To be specific, she gave me Blackwing Palomino #602.  Personally adorned with a winding of washi tape of stunning orange, yellow, and green to keep someone else from mistaking it for their Blackwing Palomino #602.  But it wasn't just a pencil, you need to understand.  It was a gift - spontaneous, thoughtful, without pretense, and with nary a shadow of quid pro quo.  A gesture from the heart.

Geri and I attended a writers conference in Orange Beach late last fall and were happy to reconnect with a young lady we met at the same conference the year before.  Since she probably wouldn't want  the attention, for simplicity's sake, I'll just call her "Amy."  We were sitting at the same table during the conference keynote dinner and, while most people were thumbing away at their smartphones capturing items of note, Amy was recording her thoughts in prehistoric fashion:  pencil on paper.  And what a pencil it was!  Even without the colorful Washi tape, it was a handsome instrument of aromatic cedar wood painted medium grey  and topped with an eraser that looked like it had been run over by a Subaru.

I had barely finished expressing my admiration of that fine writing instrument when she pushed it toward me past delinquent crumbs of yeast rolls and through small pools of water from our condensating water glasses.

"What?" I said.

"It's yours," she answered.

Well, I told her that I couldn't possibly take her pencil, especially since she had gone to the trouble to dress it up with the nice tape and all.  It was obviously special to her.

"I have another," she said with a look of triumph, digging in her bag and extracting a second Blackwing Palomino #602.  (Much shorter and undecorated, I noticed, and I was already gloating over the fact that my new pencil was the obvious superior of the two.)

(I know just about now that some of you are getting ready to speed-read the rest of this blog because a:  you're just really not all that into pencils or b: there's paint drying somewhere that needs your immediate attention...but, if you will, bear with me just another couple of minutes.)

What was just a germ of thought at the time and has since bloomed large and loud:  the simplest kindnesses in life are always, always, going to pack the biggest punch.  And people really aren't all that complex and in need of big, cinematic moments.  In this current environment of personal and social warfare, from the real violence that bangs and stumbles its way out into the streets to the passive-aggressive spit-fights of memes and words in the alleyways of social media, simple gestures of camaraderie and friendship carry a lot of weight.  Enough weight, in fact, to squash so much of this spiteful silliness that we are exposed to day in and day out.  And whether either of us knew it at the moment, what Amy did meant a great deal to me.

In fact, I used that Blackwing Palomino #602 to create the first draft of this blog.  Its graphite lead eased my words on paper like silk on suede while its eraser absolved me of my original sins of syntax.  My words waltzed out of that suave devil.  Having finished, I decided I wouldn't use that pencil again.  One and done.  I would preserve it, save what was left so that it would always have plenty of life left in it, its needle-sharp point ready to strike at moment's notice.  A souvenir, a keepsake.  Maybe put it on my desk to be sucked into the black hole of clutter that resides there.  Then better judgement vanquished that thought and I decided that, doggone it, I will write that pencil right down to its gnarly little stub and rub at that eraser until its metal ferrule mutilates the paper.  That's why it was gifted to me and I would be doing the giver and the pencil an injustice if I approached it differently.

I suspect all gifts are meant to be used right down to the nub, right to the very end.  Gifts of talent, skill, and proficiency passed down from the Supreme Gifter as well as a friend's gently used number two pencil, with a few light bite marks providing an extra dose of character.  Gifts are meant to be used for the good they bring and the joy they create.  Gifts come in all shapes, sizes, and usages, and you never want to look a single one in the mouth.  Gifts aren't meant to be hidden or saved for later.  What would the point be?  If Amy's gift to me works out the way I wish, it will bring at least a brief respite from the written and spoken violence we are often exposed to.  A counterbalance to spite and ugliness.  A shading, if you will, of soft graphite offerings on brand new pages, toward something a little better.  An olive branch bobbing on the flood waters.

Just the right words can do that you know.