[lit-ideas] Sunday Twofer

  • From: David Ritchie <profdritchie@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Sun, 29 Sep 2013 12:52:15 -0700

When chickens play there's bound to be kicking, and considerable debate about 
rules.  Recently ours found an old baseball in their exercise yard.  Perhaps 
the dog put it there perhaps, who knows what, some lost beaver's ghost?   All 
six chix wandered up going, "Oooooh!"  "Would you look at that!"  "I was 
surprised, were you surprised, I was quite surprised."  They evaluated from all 
angles.  "Wensleydale, go on, give it a peck."  "No, you."  "I will if 
you're...too...chicken..."  What a joke! "Chicken!  Ha! Chicken!"  "Whaaaat?"  
"Whaaaat!"  Soon they were running all over, thoroughly engaged.  I couldn't 
quite make out what sport they were attempting, Quidditch possibly?  The 
essence seemed to be that after you had scuffed the earth, you gave the ball a 
kick.  At one point someone yelled, "Why didn't you cross it? I was wide open." 
 The black one limped off in a huff, gesturing at me as if I were a ref.  
Settled into a nesting box, she squeezed out her ire, muttered long replays of 
what should have gone on.  Finally with a triumphant shriek, she laid an egg, 
raised up, got back in the game.

Expecting, as one does sometimes, quite illogically I'll grant, that after my 
long journey my home city might have changed, I returned from a long long drive 
in the sunny climes of Califor-ni-a to buckets and buckets of dumping rain.  If 
the pathetic fallacy were in play I'd now be in in a terrible mental twist, 
emotions scattered like limbs torn from a Douglas fir, my heart gusting like 
the wind, tantrums hissing around the house like cats.  Apart from having to 
clean up the mess left by careless and inaccurate beasts, though a little stiff 
of back and noting the possibility of a power outage, actually I'm really quite 
content.  If we must get literary, anthropomorphizing like one who has stumbled 
across a magazine cover offering ten slim new uses for metaphor, I'm as content 
as an apprentice magic chicken might be after laying an egg.

David Ritchie,
Portland, 
Oregon------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html

Other related posts: