Chickens on the Balcony: A metaphor for life

The scene: a hotel room in an undisclosed location, occupied by the author and a gentleman friend who shall remain nameless.

Oh alright, let’s call him Fred.

It’s morning. I think. I know it’s light, because even with my eyes wide shut I can sense sunlight filtering through the gauzy curtains that cover the balcony doors. I have no idea what time it is, but I’m pretty sure it’s waaaaay too soon to think about getting up. It was a late night. I’m happy to just lay (lie?) there next to another warm body.

Said warm body had had the kindness to not snore the preceding night. To what that blessing can be attributed, I know not. I had learned long ago, in dealing with this particular man, to accept small miracles with gratitude and grace. Truth be told, I often times didn’t mind his snoring. It was rhythmical and downright musical at times. Sometimes it made me laugh, because it sounded like he was composing tunes via his nasal passages. Which beat the hell out of other ways his body could be making music while I was essentially trapped under the covers with it. 

Through my I-may-rise-but-I-refuse-to-shine haze, I hear Fred’s voice. Deeper than usual, as it always is immediately upon waking. A voice I loved, no matter what it said.

It said, “I hear a chicken.” 

I don’t have a memory like a steel trap, but I was fairly certain he’d never uttered this particular phrase in bed before. 

This, of course, made absolutely no sense. Any random phrase from Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody  would have made more sense. I assumed he was talking in his sleep and ignored it.

A few steady breaths later, he said, “there it is again.” His tone was more staccato; he definitely was not sleep-talking.

He got out of bed like a man on a mission, and pulled on an ugly white hotel-issued robe – a wise move since he was headed out the doors to the balcony.

From outside, he said, more resolutely, “There’s a bloody chicken out here.”

Now, I didn’t know what he thought he was seeing, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t a chicken. We were five floors up. And while the hotel wasn’t in the midst of a metropolis, I hadn’t noticed any neighboring chicken farms.

I laughed out loud; it was my polite laugh, the one I used when I thought somebody was completely wrong but I didn’t want to be so rude as to say so. 

He knew me well enough to know it was my I-think-you’re-looneytunes laugh. He’d always read me eerily well. I couldn’t get much past him, and certainly not my polite laugh, not even this soon after waking.

A moment later he was dragging me by the hand, throwing the other ugly white hotel-issued bathrobe at me and towing me out the doors to the balcony. He stopped me at the precise mark and turned my body to the precise viewing angle.

There was a freakin’ chicken on the railing of the balcony of the suite next door. It was either a chicken or some other kind of bird that looked like a chicken, talked like a chicken and walked like a chicken. Brown and red and feathered and clucking.

I looked up. There was one more floor above us and then the roof. I looked down. There was a café next to the hotel with annoyingly chipper looking people having breakfast. I saw no way a chicken could have gotten up here. But there it was. 

I turned around and looked at Fred. He was standing with both hands on his hips, head cocked slightly and the most glorious, sleep-tousled wavy masses of hair cascading all to one side. He had hair that people would have killed for. One brow was raised defiantly as he regarded me with his very best “I told you so” look.

I was about to comment when his gaze shifted back to the chicken and he exclaimed, “It’s going to jump!” 

I whirled back ‘round in time to see the chicken leap. It plummeted five floors in a flutter of feathers and squawking, bounced off the edge of a café patio umbrella and landed smack dab in the middle of somebody’s breakfast. People screamed and scattered, dishes flew, and the chicken high-tailed it off the table and scurried away.

Faces turned upward, and we realized to our horror that those people thought we had dropped a chicken bomb on them. We ran inside and recoiled from the balcony before the angry villagers could return fire. Thank goodness we had at least been wearing the bathrobes. I could imagine the headline: Naked Couple Fowls Breakfast of Unsuspecting Diners.

Later, we were having a leisurely lunch in a restaurant in the same hotel.

A waiter walked by and served the people at the next table a delicious looking, lavishly garnished meal of poultry and pasta. 

A few moments passed with no sound other than the delicate, civilized clinking of silverware. 

Then, without looking up, and with totally deadpan delivery, Fred said,  “Do you suppose that’s him?”

He raised his eyes to meet mine, smiled a mischievous smile and we laughed the way two people do when they are the only two people in the world who know what the joke is. It was a silly, irreverent moment that remains as vivid in my mind now, years after, as when it happened.

I realized much later that the chicken on the balcony was a metaphor for many things in life; things that defy explanation, things that make no sense, things that simply shouldn’t be but that irrefutably just ARE.

The unexplained doesn't fit comfortably into my personal paradigm box. I prefer to wrap everything up with a tidy, logical explanation. But life isn’t like that. Things that shouldn’t, can’t possibly, happen, do. Sometimes you just have to call a chicken a chicken, and let it go.

You never know when you will discover the chickens on the balconies of your life. The most you can hope for is that when you do, you'll have had the presence of mind to pull on that ugly white hotel-issued bathrobe first.

Ready. Fire. Aim.

How do you know when a gun is loaded?

Knowing the one (and only) correct answer to this question was the first and most important prerequisite to receiving my firearms safety certificate.

I took the firearms safety course when I was in high school, prior to joining the Rifle Club. Our school (and, in fact, most high schools in Western New York State) had a rifle club and team.

Yes. We had guns. In the school. All the time.

If a person was a member of the Rifle Club, they could, during their free periods, sign out a gun, be handed a box of ammunition (with the same have-a-nice-day casualness that a cashier would hand over a box of Tictacs), and shoot on the indoor rifle range in the school basement. Here’s your gun. Here are your shells. Have fun.

And, we did.

I can see your mouths hanging open in amazement, but I promise, I shit you not.

Nobody thought anything of it. Like football, basketball and wrestling, riflery was a bonafide high school sport. I got my varsity letter participating on the Rifle Team. The team was undefeated in the State during my high school years. I received my National Rifle Association Expert Rating – the highest marksmanship designation – when I was a junior. To receive this rating, I had to achieve an average score of 98 or above (on a scale of 1 to 100) shooting at a bullseye the size of a pea from fifty feet. When you consider   the fact that I can’t even back my car into a parking space without hitting something, that accomplishment seems even more amazing.

Rifle clubs in high schools are, unfortunately, a thing of the past. It’s too bad. There’s a lot to be said for teaching respect for firearms and how to handle them properly. I remember the first time I shot a rifle – the noise, the recoil. I thought, ‘Holy shit, I could KILL somebody!’ Granted, it was only a .22 calibre rifle, which was probably less likely to kill than just really tick somebody off.  Still, it made the concept real to me. You point at somebody, you shoot...there are severe consequences.

I’ve fired all kinds of weapons, from shotguns at woodchucks and clay pigeons to semi-automatic weapons at the pistol range. Oh, and ask me about going bat-shooting sometime. It’s never occurred to me to point a weapon at a person. Well….okay, it’s occurred to me (a few past boyfriends pop to mind), but I never acted on it.   It’s not that there weren’t opportunities.  Kids in Phys Ed classes used to run laps in the high school basement, not far from the rifle target bays. I could have taken any one of ‘em out neat as you please. It seemed unsporting, though. After all, if I could hit a hurtling clay pigeon or a mark the size of a pea, busting a cap in some slow, fat kid in a pair of bullseye-red shorts was hardly a challenge.

The demise of riflery as a school sport saddened me. But it’s a different world today. The last thing that comes to people’s minds when they think of guns in school is team sports.

I’m not opposed to people owning guns, but I’d like to see thorough background checks, psychiatric evaluations, competency tests and renewed-yearly licensing required.

There should also be some sort of test to determine whether a gun owner has the stones to actually follow through. I have had a number of people tell me “oh, I’d have a gun for protection, but I’d never use it. “

Excuse me?

Guns are for shooting – plain and simple, at targets, food to put on the table – or attackers. They have no other purpose. Guns are not magical talismans that you keep in your bedside table drawer and wave around to ward off evil. If you do not believe you could pick it up, and point it at someone, and shoot, you have no business owning it. If you can’t use it, I guarantee your aggressor will be more than willing to take it away from you and use it against you. Gun ownership is a solemn responsibility. Never, EVER take it lightly.

I do not currently own a gun, but if circumstances dictated, I would. I’ve still got my NRA “Expert” medals in a little display box on one of my shelves. I look back on them fondly. And, every now and then, I think to myself, a few of you former boyfriends really don’t know how lucky you are.

Oh, and the correct answer to the question at the beginning of this blog?

 A gun is always loaded.

Crackbook

I recently joined Facebook.

I swore I never would.  Really, swore. Out loud. MANY times.

But then I found an old high school friend I really wanted to get in touch with. The only way to get his contact info was to succumb and join. Reluctantly, I put up a profile. I figured if I was looking for people, maybe people were looking for me. I’d put up one profile. One picture. Have one or two friends. Three, tops. That’s all I needed. No more. Really.

It all started out innocently enough. 

Now I know why a friend of mine calls it Crackbook. It sucks you in and gets you addicted.  It makes you write on people’s walls. It makes you comment on their photos. It makes you send out useless ‘status reports’ that are nothing more than telling somebody some stupid ass thing that you’re thinking or doing at a given moment. Who the hell cares?

Apparently, everybody.

Seriously. EVERYBODY.

EVERYBODY is on Crackbook. The number of people I have found that I haven’t heard from or about in 30 years is astounding. Men are easier to find than women. Women change their names. Other than when it’s required by the witness protection program, men don’t. Even then, I bet there’s some witness protection program version of Facebook. Maybe it’s called FaceLessBook.

Facebook makes you forget things like the fact that if you haven’t had contact with someone for 30 years, maybe there’s a reason for that. But suddenly you simply HAVE to put them on your friends list and look at their photos and read their personal information. Why? Why now?

Because it’s Crackbook.

It IS like a bad acid trip sometimes. The interface is horribly done and entirely user-unfriendly. Whoever designed it should be shot, run over with a steamroller and left for the buzzards. It’s a visual cacophony of photos, links, comments, status updates and other crap (my fingers slipped when I was logging in the other day and instead of Facebook I typed Fecebook. I laughed out loud at the appropriateness of my error).

A friend of mine (a real friend, not a Crackbook friend) described Facebook as a way to be connected without having to be TOO connected. That’s true. It sort of gives you an omniscient look into everyone’s lives, like you’re some all-knowing being looking in on your children.

Of course, that street runs both ways. Friends can look in on YOU.  People you hoped to never see or hear from again can find you.  Girls that wouldn’t give you the time of day in high school suddenly WANT to be your friend (fortunately, Facebook has the IGNORE button). You’ll get bombarded with crap like ‘who’s your celebrity friend of the day’ announcements and ‘how well do you know’ somebody quizzes. Like any addiction, you must take the downers along with the uppers.

Still….I have to admit…..verrrrrrry reluctantly…..that it IS sorta fun. In a sick, twisted, time-wasting sort of way. I might just been a teesny-weensy bit hooked on Crackbook.

But I can quit any time I want to.

Really.

note: before you send me, or anyone, a friend request on Facebook, you should take a listen to this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7MuwPlOiNQ

Ants in My Pantry

I started seeing them earlier this week.

Scout ants – the lone soldiers that precede the invasion. Their job: to gather intelligence and map the location of unguarded foodstuffs then return to the nest and issue the order to invade.

They’re patient. They’re waiting for me to make a mistake. They’re waiting for me to leave toast crumbs on the counter, a Starbucks cup on the desk or a dish with a little bit of food on it in the sink. They’re waiting for me to forget to put the blackberries back in the refrigerator. 

They’re thorough. I see them in different places every day.

They’re careful. There aren’t enough of them to constitute a trail that I can follow to find out where they’re coming from. Yet. 

It’s a game we play several times per year.

I don’t so much mind a few ants. I admire ants, actually. They’re clever. They’re industrious. They’re organized. This is more than I can say for myself most days. No, I don’t mind a few ants.

I mind when a few ants invite their four thousand buddies to join them. It’s like telling your kids they can have a few friends over and discovering the entire junior high school population in your swimming pool when you come home.

So, much as I hate to do it, I kill the scout ants, because I know if they find a morsel of food they’ll sound the alarm and my kitchen will be ant-central-station. If I thought they’d just carry off a few bread crumbs to their pals and be done with me, I’d let them go.  Of course, if I permitted that, I could be opening up a whole ‘nother can of worms. If I let them take a few bread crumbs, what next? Would I put my sandwich down to answer the phone only to come back and find it gone? Would I catch them trying to sneak a beer out of the refrigerator? I know it would only be a matter of time before I came home from the movies one night, looked around my studio and thought “Waaaaaaiiit a minute……where’s my TV?” No, ants are a little TOO industrious. It’s best to nip their aspirations in the bud.

Ants get in to EVERYthing. They get into places where you didn’t even know you had places. High places. Low places. Odd places. Like your iron. I discovered this when I was ironing and steam-flattened ants appeared in burgeoning patterns across my favorite blouse. You could tell some of them had been trying to run. It was obvious that most of them never saw it coming and were plastered with WTF expressions permanently steam-seared onto their faces.

Ants get into light sockets. Did you know they make little popping sounds when they reach a certain temperature?

Ants get into plants. A blow dryer on the lowest heat setting will get them off the plants, but will also fling ants and dirt all over the room. I found this out exactly the way you might imagine.

I don’t like waging chemical warfare. So I’ve tried other methods of ant control. I’ve tried cloves. I’ve tried cucumbers. I’ve tried ant bait. I’ve tried hairspray (not spraying it on them, just bashing them with the can).  I even used a lint brush once. Okay, twice.

But the best solution, by far: the vacuum.

No crushing little ant bodies, no scraping up and disposing little ant remains. No little CSI ant investigations. The ants are sucked away leaving no clue as to the cause of their demise.  It’s quick and I imagine it’s painless. They never know what hit them.

Or, maybe they do. Perhaps some enterprising little ant with a little ant digital camera caught the incident on video. Somewhere on some tiny ant computer screen logged in to AntTube.com, perhaps I am starring in a shaky video titled The Redhead Vacuum Massacre.

If I am, I can only hope the video wasn’t taken one of those times I was vacuuming in my underwear.