The Silence Of The Hams

All evidence to the contrary, this has not become a critter blog.

However.

Yesterday as TG and I were walking into the building at our church where he teaches an adult Sunday School class, me clutching his hand and struggling to keep up as always (yes ... he has to drag me to church), I heard something on the fragrant southern Sunday morning air that stopped me in my tracks: the crow of a rooster. TG the tall-and-rangy, always at least two full strides ahead of me, let his arm stretch to its full length before looking back to determine the source of my problem.

"Huh?" I grimaced. "Where in the sam hill is the rooster?"

TG chuckled. "Back over there," he said as he pointed behind us. "Actually there's a couple of 'em. You'll hear them every now and then."

Well, I never have. Our church property covers at least ten acres on both sides of a street that lies not two miles due west of downtown Columbia. And while not exactly the big apple, Columbia is a milieu just urban enough that one does not expect to hear the crowing of roosters within spitting distance of the skyline. And yet that's what I heard, and upon the introduction of that fowl's strangled alpha-male cry to my consciousness, I was transported back in time approximately eight years.

Andrew was eleven years old and heavily into livestock. In addition to having found employment mucking out the stalls of horses at the nearby Baby Paws Farm (where there resided llamas so fierce that, according to Andrew, they would hurl a special type of invective your way when riled ... as in, they thought nothing of drenching you in saliva. "And you didn't want to tick them off when they were eating," Andrew tells me. "We fed them pellets of corn and if they got mad with a mouthful of those hard kernels, their ears would go back and they'd knit their eyebrows together and if you didn't get out of the way in time, they sprayed you with corn and it felt like being attacked with a pellet gun."), the boy, under the tutelage of his father (a/k/a "Mr. Green Jeans"), joined the 4H club and decided to raise chickens.

"Lovely!" I quasi-enthused when TG and the boy advised me of their plan. "Knock your lights out but don't involve me for a single second!" (See, I'm a city slicker.)

Several "chickens" purchased from a local farmer and duly ensconced in a hastily-constructed coop in our large backyard were soon pecking around in the dirt and at one another. Everything was fine until a little gender-bending became apparent: one of them was actually a rooster. For some incomprehensible reason, Andrew named him Bob. Bob the rooster. Which was perfectly all right with me until one morning when, oh, three-thirtyish, Bob found his voice.

Because TG and I shared a bedroom with windows facing the backyard, which windows were slightly open to the clement weather, Bob's matutinal combination of music and lyrics woke me -- and only me -- from a sound sleep. (TG and the kiddies could sleep through a freight train becoming derailed and plunging through the middle of our house, wailing all the way.)

Perhaps you are thinking, how fussy can you be? The rooster crows in the middle of the night; you wake up, turn over, and go back to sleep; right? Wrong. Because the vociferous Bob loved the sound of his own pipes. He loved it so much that he crowed with startling regularity approximately 18 out of each 24 hours. Each and every 24 hours.

Barely above curmudgeon status when rested and on my best behavior, I become practically incoherent when deprived of sleep. After a few weeks of being awakened before first light by Bob's strident and persistent vocal stylings, I was haggard and homicidal. Finally I cornered TG and the boy and looked menacingly back and forth between their concerned faces. "Get rid of him or I'll cold-cock him and then fricassee him," I intoned. Somehow I convinced them of my sincerity. That afternoon Bob, still crowing, was crated and carted deep into the country to the farm of some friends who were thrilled to add his flamboyant carcass to a preexisting menagerie.

I closed the windows, closed the blinds, and went to bed. My astute family allowed me to sleep until I was good and ready to wake up.

So now perhaps you more fully understand my visceral reaction to the sound of the rooster crowing within earshot of the churchyard. Rest assured: when swine are airborne over the Southeastern United States and can be heard singing R-E-S-P-E-C-T in four-part harmony, I'll allow another rooster to live in my yard. Until then I'll sleep as late as the neighborhood barking machines will let me.

Comments

[Keli]

Boy, do I understand about roosters! My kids were into 4-H and chickens, and we too had a very vociferous rooster. At night, the kids boxed him up and put him in the barn to crow to his heart's content (as long as I didn't hear him). I guess once a city slicker, always a city slicker.