Is that chicken?

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 One of the great, modern suburban tragedies is that mail boxes have been replaced by the oversized mail cupboard with each house allocated a puny cubby.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:

• 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." 

In the Dog House

"I'll be fast," she just said. "It doesn't take me long to be eloquent."

Thelma is writing a blog as we speak. She is itching to get something out. I can guess what it is.

We just returned from dinner with my parents and siblings to celebrate my mother's 60th birthday. Thelma and I walked into the Olive Garden lobby a fashionable ten minutes late at 6:40. My brothers had been there since 6:00. By the time we arrived, the natives were already restless. By seven o'clock the situation was becoming dire. We had been told repeatedly that a big party was getting ready to leave and we couldn't be seated until they had left. Meanwhile, numerous smaller parties were coming and going all around us. At 7:15, my brothers told me I needed to go deal with the situation as the oldest. I did my best to make the host and hostess uncomfortable about the situation. When that didn't help, I asked to speak to the manager.

Restaurant or retail managers don't always bring out the best in me. Sometimes I can be very cool and collected. Other times, not so much.

I remember going on a date with Thelma once. We took the ferry to Whidbey Island. It was a stormy day with very few people out and about. We ventured to the west side of the island where the Strait of Juan de Fuca meets the Puget Sound. The wind was pumelling the shore with giants waves and thowing sea spray across the road. The sky was dark and foreboding.

For a storm lover like me, it was a perfect night. Then it happened. The Dog House.

The Dog House is a tavern/dining room in Langley. It's one of the those places that is supposed to be so alive with character that the food can't help but taste good. The New York Times has described the Dog House like this:

"On the waterfront, the Dog House tavern — the Dog as it’s called by locals — seems to have enjoyed as many lives as a cat: a general store; a high school gymnasium; a site for vaudeville shows, silent movies, dance classes and, perhaps most improbably, meetings of a ladies’ temperance society. Today, it seems like the kind of place where you might encounter many a salty dog."

What you won't encounter is good food. My meal was a dog. The clam chowder had frozen chunks floating in it. My fish tacos were cold. My temper was high. If they could have tapped into my rage, they could have run the defective microwave they had obviously used to prepare my meal. I refused to pay for it. I was angry. I was argumentative. My reaction would have made quite a scene but there was no one else in the restaurant. Just Thelma, the waitress and the manager. We could have brought the cook out to join the party, but I don't think they actually had one on site that night.

Whether or not I ultimately paid full price, I don't recall. I just remember the rage.

Tonight, thankfully, was a different story. It was the calm, cool, collected me that asked to speak with the manager at the Olive Garden. The host we had been harassing with questions of "how much longer" went to find him for me. Even that took some time. After a pass or two through the restaurant, he came to tell me that he was having trouble finding him, but there was one more place he could look. I saw him duck into the men's bathroom. A few moments later the manager emerged looking a bit hurried.

I shook his hand and told him my name. (Perhaps the hand shake was a bad idea. Just how hurried was he coming out of the restroom?) I nicely explained that we had been waiting 75 minutes to get a seat. I told him how it didn't appear they valued our business. I told him the effusive apologies were appreciated, but really didn't do anything to help the situation.

About that time one of my brothers came over to say he had found another place that would seat us right away. My other brother approached the manager.

"Thanks a lot for making us wait two hours."

"I'm very sorry, sir."

"Shut up."

My brother won't win any awards for eloquence or conflict resolution, but his contribution wasn't all bad. I was the good cop. He was the bad cop. The manager was much more willing to see things my way knowing that I was keeping an angry mob at bay.

The rest of the family left. I asked the manager what he could do to help make things up to my mother. He came back with a nice gift card. I smiled, told him I appreciated the gesture and thanked him and his staff for at least being courteous with us.

I left the restaurant feeling pretty good about myself for keeping my cool and getting some cash out of the situation. Then I thought, "Where did everyone go?"

Living Life in Draft

My wife is a blog hog—and a prolific one at that. On more than one occassion in the past few weeks, I've thought of posting to this blog about some topic only to find that she has beat me to it. The way our Christmas bear tradition was hatched in our poverty. My near-death experience with a pack of feral teenagers. The snowball luminaries I learned to make in Finland.

It's that last one that really takes the cake. I knew I would have to be quick to the computer if I was going to write about it before Thelma did. But how quick? Impossibly so. Before I had my gloves of and had dusted the snow off my sandals, Thelma had beat me to the punch.

Perhaps I'll start writing about what I'm going to do.

I'm convinced that Thelma lives her life in draft. Somewhere in her mind she is always writing. She captures life in written form and then it's just a matter of finding time to get it down on paper. Dumbledore had a pensieve in the Harry Potter stories. Thelma has a blog.

The wonderful thing about living life in draft is that it gives you an opportunity to make final edits before fully committing it to paper or post or even memory.

Take December 2002, for example. I live in the moment. It was a time of cold, miserable nights in a drafty old house with a newborn baby. For Thelma, though, it was "a Christmas of precious little sleep and precious time gazing into my newborn Mark’s eyes by the light of the Christmas tree." That's the beauty of living life in draft. My memories are rigid and brittle. Thelma's are fluid and flowing.

Every now and again I still get hung up on the facts of a situation when I listen to Thelma tell a story or read over her shoulder as she writes an email to family or friends. Every now and again I protest and insist, "That's not how it was!" But, it's only every now and again. Life is much better by the time Thelma is done with it.