Pet Chickens

I had the greatest grandparents EVER. There are few things I would fight over, but I would cage fight anyone who suggested otherwise. Each grandparent provided me with different things I needed to grow up relatively sane, but my father's parents provided me with something unique: farm animals.

Nanny and Grandaddy farmed forty acres in Drew, Mississippi. After my parents' divorce, they would drive 25 miles to meet my mom and pick me up and take me to the farm for the weekend. There I learned key skills like how to call bobwhites, catch catfish, and pick figs. I don't use any of those skills currently, but they are ready to be whipped out as needed.

Their house was a steady stream of basically feral cats that my grandfather could get to sit beside him and be petted. My job was to name them. Smokey, Midnight, Spunky (the Mike Tyson of the cat world),plus innumerable visitors. One of those visitors regularly had kittens in the back storage building, and those kittens were regularly eaten by some wild animal. In fifth grade, I wrote an essay about the decapitation of the kittens that would probably get me referred to a psychologist today, but at the time I was fascinated by the fact that coyotes came in the yard overnight to catch them.

My grandfather was particularly indulgent of my desire to have pets. Lots of pets. One of my earliest memories is going to the hardware store on Main Street where there was a big box of baby chicks and being told to choose one. I grabbed a loud, polka-dot chicken and spent the next weekend loving him to death. I carried him around by his HEAD. My mother was horrified, but my grandmother was rooting for him to die. This was because I had trained him to ride around on my head, but anytime I sat him on her, he would crap. Like crap his whole body weight.

Of course, Spotty grew up. And I must have caused him brain damage because he grew up MEAN. My grandparents ended up with an attack chicken. He chased off all the farm cats. He would fly up, spurs out, into the face of a dog the size of a German Shepherd. He terrorized the bantam chickens. He chased cars. If a rooster can be evil,he was evil. By the time he was grown, the only thing he was scared of was a broom. When Nanny would go out to hang the laundry, she would carry a broom in her hand and she would have to watch under the sheets to make sure he was not doing some special forces sneak up on her. If he was, she would drop the basket and swing at him like Babe Ruth. Whenever, we would need to go to the car, Grandaddy would open the door and tell us to RUN. He chased my father up a tree and we had to go and sweep Spotty away. Grandaddy, who was perhaps the most sincere Christian I have ever known, used to look at Spotty and say he should take him into the ring as a fighting rooster. Finally, though, Spotty did the unthinkable. He attacked me. I was out in the yard playing, and he came up and drug his CLAWS down the back of my leg. I had a scar for years.

The next weekend when I went to my grandparents, Spotty was gone. I asked Grandaddy where Spotty was and he told me he had given him to the "colored man" (this is 1974) down the road who needed a rooster. The next visit when I asked about Spotty, I found out that Spotty was no more. Apparently when he killed two of the man's "setting hens" instead of fertilizing some eggs, Spotty was fried for Sunday dinner.

Dreams and space walks

Oh, it only takes 5 months to come up with something to say. I have a nasty case of bronchitis right now, and I am taking way too many drugs for it. Finally after 4 days of not sleeping longer than 45 minutes at a stretch, someone told me, "Oh, the steroids are doing that." Hm, guess that is why the drugstore gives you a list of all the side effects to read and maybe I should not be so anxious to recycle it next time. So, tonight I am not going to take the steroid before bed and pray that I get sleep.

Here is the problem with sleep, though. I DREAM. My dreams are so complicated and detailed that sometimes I wish I could wake up with a flow chart describing them because they rarely have anything to do with reality, and I am pretty sure that Freud wouldn't touch them and he would just send me to a padded room. For example, last night. Last night, I dreamed that I was a nurse. Fine, I completely stink at sympathetic care, BUT I was wearing one of those cool little white hats that nurses don't wear anymore. The weird part was I was a nurse who followed an anarchist band of people around and helped all the people that their destruction hurt. The leader of this band was a boy who lived down the street from me when I was a kid, and his name was Glen Campbell in the time when the other Glen Campbell of Rhinestone Cowboy was famous. Glen was a child that I am betting would get lots of IQ tests that proved he was brilliant today while at the same time recommending Prozac or Ritalin or some such, but growing up I just thought he was a little bit crazy in the best possible way because he knew all the words to Pink Floyd's "The Wall." It is perfectly logical that Glen would be the leader of this anarchist group because he and I used to play a game where we would throw knives at each other's feet and place our foot where the knife was until we would end up in the middle splits and the person to fall over first "lost." Glen and I climbed many trees, played many a game of hide and seek, and then when I moved away, we lost touch. I saw Glen 8 years later, he acted like he didn't know me. Broke my heart because Glen had been the first boy to ever ask me to couple skate and the first boy to pop my bra strap the very day I first wore one. So, anyway, I am following this anarchist gang around and the main objective of this group was to eliminate the Marlboro Man. I don't know why, either, but whenever a cigarette sign got blown up, fireworks went off, and I could watch them from the tower that was only accessible through my friend Melissa's parents' closet. All of this is happening in Leland, Mississippi.

And then I had a new nightmare. I dreamed I was an astronaut, which is ridiculous because I have absolutely ZERO interest in how most scientific stuff works. So, of course I was on the space shuttle and I had to a space walk and my cord connecting me to the space shuttle got cut so until I woke up for the eighth time that night, I was slowly dying in space. Awful. However, the zombies of several months ago have not returned, so I will take my blessings.

When I was little, I watched a movie of the week about the nuns that got killed in El Salvador in the early 1980s. This was the first step on a path that I am still stumbling down where I am sure that I am supposed to some kind of mission work. It doesn't necessarily have to be religious, but the problem is that the idea of danger is kind of irrelevant, too. When I told my mom that I wanted to go and help these nuns, my mother pointed out 1) I am not Catholic 2) the nuns are dead 3) you aren't allowed to go to El Salvador while under my care. So, my new crazy plan is I want to go to somewhere and teach English. Our book club is reading this book called Half the Sky, and there are all these horrible stories aboout how women are mistreated around the world, and I realized that I really want to take a couple of months to go somewhere and teach English. My problem is I read the paper and think, "I should go to Yemen." I have not suggested this to my husband yet, but I imagine he will respond much as my mother did.

That is all. Can't promise I will write again within the next five months.