Loose Laces

 Loose Laces with attending photos can be had for free at this site.
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Chicken and I: A tale of woe and misunderstanding.

When I lived at home in my early to mid teen years, I went to church three times each week. I was no different than many kids growing up in the 1950′s, but I was just a few years ahead of my time in detesting and resisting authority such as was the norm in the next decade. As a teen, I hated school and even more, I hated being forced to go to church. At the age of 14, I was voluntarily baptized by immersion and became a Christian in fact; it was the thing to do and my mom was so proud; she would eventually get over the pride in my Christianity. Within two years, I was sick of the “you have to” portion of my my youth.

The act of going to church is the thing that eventually caused me to rebel against eating chicken. My dad did not have to got to church and I know of only a couple of time when he did so. He always said he would rather sit on a hot rock in hell than attend church services. I was learning. Of course my dad’s cavalier attitude did not go unpunished by my mom; his purgatory was cooking Sunday dinner for she and I while we were singing and praying and making other joyful noises unto the lord.

It was a pretty good arrangement to begin with, but my dad was not known as a creative chef; three Sundays out of four, he prepared fried chicken, chicken gravy, mashed taters, peas, whole-kernel corn, and brown-and-serve rolls. The one Sunday when he did not fry chicken, he made cubed steak with the same side fixings.
I happened to like chicken; I was country born and raised and it was a natural to eat chicken on Sundays at least once each month. The trouble began when I ate chicken nearly every Sunday for years and I eventually came to dislike it. In 1963 when Carolyn and I were dating, a local restaurant had a Thursday special on carry-out chicken and it had been a year or three since I had partaken of the fowl, so I gave it another try. We got our food which was bird, mashed taters, gravy, and a pair of biscuits and took it home to enjoy. Mine was dripping blood when I bit into it! That turned me completely against eating chicken and I did not have another piece until the mid-70s when I tried some of Colonel Sander’s offerings; again chicken, mashed taters, and gravy with a roll; I was not impressed and once more swore off that particular cuisine.

All went well until last winter when Carolyn decided she wanted some quick chicken and went to Wal-Mart deli and bought some pre-fried along with the ubiquitous mashed taters, gravy, and rolls. I will have to admit that is smelled good when she came in the door toting several cartons of instant gratification, and after she coerced me long enough, I agreed to eat a piece of leg and breast. It looked good and smelled great … at first. I took a bite and noticed something in my mouth felt wrong; the damned bird still had pieces of feathers sticking out of it! I am still pouting over the highly unsatisfactory “meal”. Carolyn and JJ ate the same as I, but theirs was fine and I came to the conclusion that chickens do not like me, so now I can only get even by eating their high cholesterol eggs. I never did like chicken gravy and haven’t tried it since I was small. I still love mashed taters, peas, corn, and brown-and-serve rolls, and I savor cubed steak; just no chicken, if you please.
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Have a Thursday!
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