Once Upon A Time

there was a young girl who lived with her mother, her father, her brother, and a whole bunch of chickens. Every day she would help collect the eggs, which was always a lesson in self-defense and the odds of luck vs. skill. One of the chickens out of the bunch became her pet and he followed her all around, kind of like Mary's lamb or Fern's Wilbur. She called him Hickety-Pickety. They were good buddies.

BUT came the day that it was time for chickens to head to the butcher. Don't ask me why. It's not like this was a farm in the middle of nowhere and the family had to live off the chickens. But at any rate, it was chicken harvest time and the young girl was incensed that Hickety-Pickety was headed for the gallows as well. His being a friend of the family didn't seem to give him amnesty. I don't know if there were tears or not---I scarce remember--but one thing was determined: the girl vowed never to eat her old friend Hickety-Pickety. Her parents complied and they carefully wrote Hickety's name on the outside of the butcher paper. Being 10, it made perfect sense that a chicken went directly from the hand of the butcher to its stiff white paper prison. It never occurred to her, apparently, that there'd be no way to keep track of one dead chicken from another.

Months passed. Whenever chicken was served, the girl sped to the freezer, flung open the door and confirmed that Hickety was still safely wrapped and stored, spared from knife and fork, at least, if not from the indignity of an unheroic death.

I don't know what finally prompted the girl to one day check the contents of the Hickety package. Imagine her horror when she realized it was empty....just a white, paper shell with the words "Hickety-Pickety" now nothing but a mockery. Talk about shock! Oh, the agony! She'd been hoodwinked AND she'd broken her promise.

I wonder if that was a defining moment. If it had any lasting impact. I don't know how she finally reconciled the"damage" done. Perhaps the pain of the discovery lingered and festered for awhile; maybe she forgot about it by the following week. I guess it couldn't have been too horrible an aftermath since I don't really remember it; the trauma must've been minor or else I blocked it from my mind. Maybe that's what's wrong with me??

At any rate, it was an early important lesson about life: what's on the outside isn't necessarily indicative of what's on the inside.