Sometimes I see chickens where there are no chickens. This made me worry about myself at first, but I’ve come to find it delightful. Even though most of the time it happens to me while I’m driving.
The other morning my wife and I saw a woman jogging on the side of the road. Both of us noticed that she was running Tina Belcher style, with her arms straight behind her back.
“How is she running with her arms back like that?” Melanie asked.
“I don’t know, I…” I did a double take. “Is she running with a chicken?”
By the time Melanie asked me to repeat myself, I saw that the jogger was just passing a small orange cone.
“Never mind,” I said. “It was just a cone. I thought she had a chicken on a leash.”
“No, definitely not.”
“Why do I keep seeing chickens everywhere?”
“I don’t know, my love.”
“Do you think it’s because I want us to have our own chickens so I’m just manifesting them?”
“We’re not putting them on leashes,” she said. “They would peck our ankles off.”
The thought of jogging with a chicken frantically flapping its wings, pecking at me, and yelling, “Ba-gock!” made me laugh so hard I almost missed my turn.
The first time this happened, was a couple of years ago when I was exiting the interstate and I saw what appeared to be two black chickens pecking under the overpass. It was garbage bags. Another time while driving, I was tickled by the sight of a little red hen walking down the side walk. It was a small dog. At least that time I was in the animal kingdom.
In my defense, there are lots of free-range chickens walking around New Orleans. They’re in places that you wouldn’t expect to find them, or at least places where I wouldn’t expect to find them. I thought chickens only lived in barns and Fisher-Price farm sets. But in my city they peck pot holes in the street. The roost in trees outside of the French Quarter. There are two healthy fat ones that pick at the grass near an Episcopal church on Carrolton Avenue.
None of them are jogging. Which is why Melanie shook her head and said, “You a mess,” while I laughed hysterically at the idea of a chicken attacking my ankles as I jogged down the road.
And she’s right. But my cartoonish imagination is what’s gotten me through dark times in the last couple of years. So why not, for just a moment, a chicken? Why not frogs dancing a waltz? Why not, indeed, a flamingo eating a plate of waffles before I do a double take and realize that it’s a crow picking at a Burger King wrapper?
It’s when I do a double take and still see the jogging chicken that we should all really start to worry. Not me, though, I guess. I’ll just be giggling with delight. Dementia could be worse.