All I could see was "is that chicken?"
I had just pulled the mail from our mail cubby. One of the great, modern suburban tragedies is that mail boxes have been replaced by the oversized mail cupboard with each house allocated a puny cubby. It's depressing to the very core. Bland, file-cabinet grey. Institutional locks. Our particular version is tipped slightly to one side from a collision with a car.
The whole scene resembles a lopsided morgue refrigeratior for mail. (My personal favorite, by the way, is the KH500 with the 26-gauge, corrosion-resistant, stucco-embossed, coated steel interior walls.)
Insert key. Open door. Slide out letters. Shut door. Remove key. Try not to drop key in the strategically-placed storm drain directly below. Throw mail away. Curse Wilmington, Delaware, for the avalanche of credit card applications.
There is, occasionally, some mild drama when you're anticipating a package. The package—if it's a respectable package of a decent size—won't fit in the mail coffin. Instead, the postman leaves the package behind the giant "door of wonder" at the bottom of the cabinet and places a key in your cubby. It's excitement, raw and unbridled, for the three and a half seconds it takes to discover the key and then rescue your package.
"...is that chicken?"
All I could see was the last half of the sentence. The first half was concealed by a fold. Thelma took the mail from me to search for late Christmas cards before I could uncover the full sentence.
"Is what chicken?"
No answer.
"What does that say about chicken!?"
Thelma was in a zone somewhere. She had moved on. It was driving me crazy. I had to know the mystery behind, or, in this case, in front of the chicken before my soul could rest. My mind was racing with possibilities:
I had just pulled the mail from our mail cubby. One of the great, modern suburban tragedies is that mail boxes have been replaced by the oversized mail cupboard with each house allocated a puny cubby. It's depressing to the very core. Bland, file-cabinet grey. Institutional locks. Our particular version is tipped slightly to one side from a collision with a car.
The whole scene resembles a lopsided morgue refrigeratior for mail. (My personal favorite, by the way, is the KH500 with the 26-gauge, corrosion-resistant, stucco-embossed, coated steel interior walls.)
Insert key. Open door. Slide out letters. Shut door. Remove key. Try not to drop key in the strategically-placed storm drain directly below. Throw mail away. Curse Wilmington, Delaware, for the avalanche of credit card applications.
There is, occasionally, some mild drama when you're anticipating a package. The package—if it's a respectable package of a decent size—won't fit in the mail coffin. Instead, the postman leaves the package behind the giant "door of wonder" at the bottom of the cabinet and places a key in your cubby. It's excitement, raw and unbridled, for the three and a half seconds it takes to discover the key and then rescue your package.
"...is that chicken?"
All I could see was the last half of the sentence. The first half was concealed by a fold. Thelma took the mail from me to search for late Christmas cards before I could uncover the full sentence.
"Is what chicken?"
No answer.
"What does that say about chicken!?"
Thelma was in a zone somewhere. She had moved on. It was driving me crazy. I had to know the mystery behind, or, in this case, in front of the chicken before my soul could rest. My mind was racing with possibilities:
- How large is that chicken?
- Isn't it true that the only person you've ever really cared about is that chicken?
- What if I told you the only thing between you and a million dollars is that chicken?
Thelma disappeared into the house. I put the car away and chased after her.
"Where's that chicken thing!? What did it say?"
"'How safe is that chicken?'" Thelma replied.
"'How safe is that chicken?'"
"Yeah."
What a waste! All that emotional energy spent on chicken safety. I don't even own a chicken. Why should I care how safe some chicken is? Besides, if I did own a chicken, I wouldn't need a safety manual to tell me I shouldn't let it cross the road or play near power lines. What kind of marketing school flunky came up with that teaser?
"How safe is that chicken? We'll tell you. See page 4."
It's been three days now and I'm not turning to page 4. Ever. I'm not giving in. I'm not going to let the headline win just because the author got lucky when the first two words were missing. That'll show 'em. That'll teach them to waste my time with cut rate copy.
It has had me thinking, though, about the strangeness of some of the words we hear strung together. I don't mean tongue twisters necessarily, although Emma (with some help from Braeden) managed to come up with a good one yesterday when we were taking turns making up fully formed sentences in which all of the words began with the same letter.
Why won't Willy wonder "why" when Wyatt's wife Wanda wanders west?
What I'm weferring referring to is the oddity of ordinary sentences made up of ordinary words that come up in ordinary conversations.
For example, I just overheard Thelma say, "I've been thinking a lot about his gruel." I'm sure it made perfect sense to say in context of her phone call with her mother, but what a strange thing to hear! I'm fairly confident that Thelma is the first person in the history of the English language to string that sentence together. (Just to be sure, I searched for the sentence on the Web using Google. No results.)
I'm certain my father produced another unique sentence the other day when Thelma and I were visiting my parents.
"Getting pregnant forced an early end to her high school wrestling career."
Again, nothing exceptional about the comment in context, but one of the strangest sentences I've ever heard.
All this talk of chicken and strange sentences reminds of an episode from the fifth season of The Red Green Show called "The Not-Chicken Franchise". In it, Red Green decides to open a fast-food franchise called I Can't Believe It's Not Chicken. The franchise is ultimately shut down when a university professor figures out what is being served.
"What was it?" Harold asks.
"Well, it wasn't chicken."
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