Chicken Dinner

I was filling in for my brother this morning and took my mother her breakfast. I normally am in charge of dinner, but due to a funeral my brother needed to attend, I am doing both breakfast and dinner today. Not a problem.

Anyway, I was telling her about a story in the newspaper about the new trend to keep and raise chickens in the local area. Some communities allow and some prohibit it and consider it a nuisance.

That got her talking about how, when she and my dad got married and set up housekeeping, they bought ten hens. The farmer ‘threw’ in a rooster for free. He said it was nasty but they could have it if they wanted. My dad agreed thinking he could handle a small bird… how bad could it be?

Well, apparently pretty bad, because he found out very quickly that he needed to take a broom in the yard with him anytime he fed them. My mother thought this was funny and after many months of this, she dared him that he was too ‘chicken’ himself to go in without the broom.

He marched in, broomless, and was viciously attacked. She felt so bad. She wanted him to kill the rooster but my dad would never kill anything. He was too gentle to even consider it. He just went back to taking the broom in again.

Weeks later, a friend of theirs asked my dad to go to a baseball game in a near by town. Off they went. My mother called her father and he came over and dispatched the rooster. When my dad came home and sat down to a chicken dinner he was hungry and enjoyed the meal.

My mother asked him what he that dinner was, and he looked at her and said “chicken of course.” she then told him he had eaten the hateful rooster.

You might think he would have laughed, but he didn’t. He told her he never would have eaten it if he had known it was the rooster.

I laughed all the way home.