Titles

I got a postcard from my dentist yesterday. I like getting postcards. It makes me feel like someone out there cares about me. Even if it is from someone who wants to stick sharp instruments in my mouth. It's still a postcard.
Usually, I don't even know why I'm going. I told my wife Jane about my appointment.

"What are you having done?" she asked.

"I don't know."

"Why are you going, then?"

"They sent me a postcard," I said and held it up for her to see.

"Ooooh, a postcard," she said.

My dentist's name is Dr. Tinney. I like him. I've never been fishing with him or anything, and he's never offered me a beer, but as dentists go, he's pretty good. The only thing I don't like about him is that I have to refer to him as Doctor Tinney. Not just me either. Everyone calls him Dr. Tinney; even his wife, who also happens to work there. Of course I've never seen them outside of his office, so for all I know she calls him Hercules when they're alone.

The thing is, he's only a few years older than me. Why do I have to call him Doctor Tinney? It basically amounts to calling him sir, which I don't appreciate. Why not Edward? Or Eddie? I'd even settle for Butch, or Skip.

Truth be told, I've always been a little bothered by the whole title thing. Why are certain occupations worthy of a title and others not? Were those extra years of college so grueling that we have to be forever reminded of the hardships they endured?

I started working when I was fourteen. I worked full time and went to school full time all through college. I even managed to get a degree. I'm still working, by the way, and the only thing people call me is Dave. Not College Graduate Dave. Not Amazing Working Guy Dave. Just Dave.

Some people will tell you that titles are used out of respect, but I don't buy it. Lawyers get to attach a few extra letters to the end of their names and no one respects them.

I'm not looking for a title, you understand. If fact, I already have one. My business card says "Creative Director." I'm a director, which if you think about it, sounds a lot like dictator, which ought to be worth something. But it's not.

A lot of people have titles. We just don't use them in casual conversation or to greet people. You rarely hear someone say, "Hey, Sales Manager Keith! How's it going?"

Technically, I'm also a Senior Vice President in my company, but this doesn't seem to have the same effect in business as it does in politics. In politics, there's always an outside chance some nut will shoot the President and you'll get the good office with the red bat-phone. In business, however, some companies have hundreds of Vice Presidents. Somebody shoots the President of your company, and you just might get the day off.

The sad truth is, no one calls me by either title. I've tried. No Director Dave, or Vice-President McCarty. Sometimes the President of the agency will refer to me in general as his Creative Director, but this usually makes me sound like a Schnauzer.

In the old days, people like doctors and lawyers got a lot of respect for a reason. They were the only ones in town who could read. When your day revolves around cow manure, tractor tires, and whether or not it's going to rain, you're bound to develop a healthy respect for anyone who made it past the eighth grade and can tell you how many bones are in your skull.

It's not just that I don't like titles; I don't like the fact that apparently, people get to choose their own. I had a job once where I picked my own title because I was the guy who designed the business cards. That's really all there is to it. If you can put it in ink, people will believe anything. I decided I'd be the Advertising and Promotion Director. And I was. But the person who had the job before me was just called Sue. I don't even think she had a business card.

Grandparents are always trying to dictate what they want to be called. They dream of the day they can be Pop-pop or Grandma. But the reality is there are far too many Noonie's, Uppie's and D's for that tactic to be working out real well.

Everyone starts with good intentions. We introduce our babies to their relatives as Grandma, or Aunt Jane, and a few years later you have a two year old calling you Dudu.

Some people don't have to work a day in their lives to get a title. In Britain, you can be a Lord, a Duke, or even an Earl just because you were born at the right time to the right parents. And if you really impress someone in the Royal Family, you can even become a knight. Anthony Hopkins, an arguably talented actor, got to be a knight for acting like a guy who ate other people. Now we're supposed to call him Sir Anthony.

I have to believe it used to be a lot harder to become a Knight back in the old days. You had to win a war or kill a dragon or something. Not just memorize some lines and lie believably about eating someone's liver.

In America, you can also get a title of sorts on the whim of your parents. The country is full of John Smith, the third's and Anthony Jones, the second's. It doesn't seem right to me that you should get a title just because you come from a long line of unimaginative people.

If you rise high enough in political office, you not only get a title, you get to keep it when you leave. Senators, Congressmen, and Presidents all get to keep their titles long after their service to their country is over. Former presidents are referred to not as Mr. So-and-so, but as former President So-and-so.

Military personnel also get to keep their titles. They don't even have to say former. For instance, the commander of Operation Desert Storm, Norman Schwartzkoff, is introduced as General Norman Schwartzkoff, United States Army, Retired. This leads me to believe that Norman remains a General. He's just retired.

There are other titles that annoy me. If you become a lawyer and hang around the job long enough, and have dinner with enough politicians, one day they might call you, "Your Honor." This sounds a little too much like royalty to me. I thought we dumped a whole bunch of tea into a harbor just to get away from that kind of thinking. It's just a guy in a black robe, who memorized some old law cases. Not that being a judge is easy, but do we really have to call them, your honor?

But it's not just politics and the military. The church has gotten into it as well. Catholic priests expect you to call them Father. I already have one father to keep track of, and I don't need any more. I'm not about to call someone Father just because he swore off sex and drinks wine in church.

Between you and me, I think the whole thing is a scam. I'm not sure how or why, or what exactly these people are up to but I'm going to get to bottom of it. For now, however, I'm off to my dentist appointment. Maybe I'll ask Ed if he wants to go grab a beer afterwards.

Wasting Time

It's Saturday morning and I've come downstairs to find my wife Jane sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee and reading a magazine. I've been upstairs showering, dressing, and generally trying to decide how I want to waste my time today.

That's what Jane calls it. Wasting time. I'm okay with that. I don't have a problem wasting time. In fact, a large part of my days off are spent contemplating how to waste as much of it as possible. I'm good at it.



Jane does not always appreciate this aspect of my character. For instance, this morning she has already run ten miles and is now having coffee in the kitchen. I, on the other hand, have just gotten out of bed.

"So, what's it going to be today?" she asks without looking up. I imagine that she's either plotting the overthrow of a small country or thinking about tearing out a wall somewhere and installing French doors.

"I can't decide," I admit. "Maybe golfing." I grab a mug out of the cupboard and pour myself some coffee. "Or surfing," I add looking out the window. It's shaping up to be a beautiful day - full of possibilities.

"Not fishing?" she says without a hint of sarcasm and refreshes her coffee. She still hasn't looked up from her magazine and I can't tell if she's serious or just giving me a hard time. She does that a lot. Gives me a hard time. She's good at it.

"I don't know," I say and I mean it.

That's the beauty of wasting time, you have no real agenda and anything pretty much suffices, as long as there is no clear goal and no set timetable.

This isn't to say I don't work hard. I work very hard. It's just that I'm a firm believer in the work hard, nap often, school of thought. This is very different from the work hard, play hard school. Disciples of that particular institution tend toward investment bankers who climb mountains on the weekend.

Let me say here and now that climbing a mountain on the weekend is just work in disguise. Climbing a mountain is not even remotely relaxing and is potentially deadly. I find it very hard to relax when death is a plausible outcome.

Because of the strenuous pace I keep during the week, I don't move very quickly on the weekends. I'm more of a shuffler by nature. By the time the weekend rolls around, I've used up all my hustle and bustle and all I've got left is a little random moseying around.

On my days off, I lumber about, checking out this part of the yard, or sampling leftovers from the refrigerator. I may lie down spontaneously and take a nap, or read three pages of a book I've already read several times while standing at the sink eating a pickle. It really doesn't matter.

The thing is, while I have a lot of interests, I would never go so far as to claim any particular passion for any of these interests. Quite frankly, with all the things I get into, I'm spread a little too thin for passion.

There are people who have passions though. I know because I've read about them. These are people who have found one thing that they do really well, and they've stuck with it. And I have a lot of admiration for them.

People who are passionate about their hobbies do not approach it frivolously. Not being all that passionate about any one thing in particular, reading about a hobby is, for me, a far more relaxing waste of time than actually participating in one. This is namely due to the fact that since I don't devote any significant portion of time to any one thing, I am by nature, a disciple of many things and a master of none.

I have more what you would call hobbies. The word itself implies frivolity and a lightness of heart. Which is exactly what I'm looking for on my days off - a little frivolous wasting of time.

The truth is, I am well known in my family for having a wide range of hobbies, none of which could be construed as overly productive. All my life I've bounced from one hobby to the next, many of them quite strange. When I was a ten, I spent the better part of a summer burning pictures of cowboys into two-by-fours with a magnifying glass. What can I say? It held my interest for a time.

I also read about a lot of different types of hobbies: from fly-fishing and surfing, to woodworking and beekeeping. I get almost as much entertainment out of reading about an activity as I do by participating in one, sometimes even more so.
When you're reading about, say fly-fishing, everything is fluid art and grace. You read about a time when the author was fishing at dusk in Montana where the air was still, the sunset brilliant and the fish hungry. You can almost see the slow, beautiful arc of line as it flows back and forth overhead, sending a light spray of water into the air. The angler is one with nature and everything is flawless. The fish strikes, the man rears back, and the fish leaps out of the water in a powerful display of will.

What you don't see is the guy who's been reading the book, standing in his neighbors yard trying to whip a fly line back and forth (his yard being too small with lots of trees that hang down so that he's already had to cut his line out a few tree limbs).
You also don't get the inside scoop on how a beautiful arc of fishing line can become a rat's nest with the flick of a wrist, or that when you're out on the water, how easy it is for your delicate little hand-tied lure to slap the water with enough brute force to actually kill a fish.

Jane believes that in addition to wasting time, what I'm really after is just a creative way to spend as much money as possible while accomplishing nothing. In fact, she contends that the more money it's possible to spend on a particular hobby, the more I'm attracted to it.

"Not true," I once argued. "I've never expressed an interest in hang-gliding and I hear that's very expensive."

"We live at the beach," she countered. "If we lived anywhere near a mountain you'd be strapping yourself to a kite and leaping off into the wild blue yonder."

"That's ridiculous," I told her, then immediately began thinking about how cool it would be to hang-glide: the thrill, the freedom, the sheer expense of it all. I began to wonder how close the nearest mountain really was and what kind of cool gear one could accumulate.

Last year, for instance, I took up golf for absolutely no good reason. I'd never before expressed any interest whatsoever. But I try to not let little details like that hold me back.

Golf is a pretty simple sport in theory: little white ball, a couple of sticks with which to hit the ball, and a big green lawn with a hole at one end. But you'd be surprised at how difficult it is and how much money you can spend. It's basically a billion dollar adult toy industry. And it's growing.

Within a mile of my office there are no less than four retailers dedicated to one thing - golf. Within ten miles of my home, there are fifteen beautifully manicured courses packed full of grown men chasing a little white ball into a hole.

I'm not really sure what the fascination is. It's a terribly difficult game. It takes years to get even remotely good and even then you have to practice almost nonstop or you lose it all. It's sort of a cumulative thing. Like alcoholism.

Add to that, that it takes between four and five hours on average to play eighteen holes and you have a tremendous amount of wasted time. If you do it right, you can even ride in a cart and drink beer. Not a bad way to spend the day if you ask me.
Even now, as I sit here in the kitchen, basking in the glow of my laptop, it's getting a little late in the day and I have yet to do anything. In fact, Jane just walked in and asked what I was doing. I really have only one indoor hobby that's worthy of a good quality wasting of time, and that's watching TV.

Jane doesn't really like TV. She says she can't appreciate the value of watching fifteen to twenty programs simultaneously in a single half hour period.

No sense of adventure if you ask me.

"So what are you doing," she asks.

"I'm writing," I say.

"What about?"

"Wasting time," I tell her, then add quickly, "You're in it."

"The usual cynical wife role?" she asks.

"Yup."

"Make me sound thin," she says and walks out of the room.

It's actually too late to go golfing and I'm too tired to go surfing. Maybe I'll go stand and look out the window for a while. It doesn't really matter. After all, I've already wasted half the day and I was raised to believe that you should never do anything halfway. Maybe I'll just turn the TV on and take a nap.

Herman's Clinic

In these times of high-tech entertainment, multi-million dollar movies, and over stimulation, the simple art of storytelling often seems eclipsed; a case of the message being overrun by the medium. However, I have found one place, or should I say one person in my life that I can still hear a story told well. My dentist.

I have had other dentists, whom I thought well of. Competent, friendly sorts, capable of reversing the damage I did to my teeth due to my inability to floss. They did not, however, personify the art of the story. Or if they did, they declined to use their patients as an audience.

One of my earlier dentists thoughtfully provided headphones that allowed the patient to tune into whatever station they preferred and thereby tune out whatever unpleasantness they were about to endure. I always appreciated this as his banter amounted to whatever he had scribbled down on my chart the first time we met. For years after our first meeting, a time during which I was doing construction to put myself through school, he continued to ask me if I was still laying brick even though I had graduated and was now the Advertising & Promotion Director for a large record company. The headphones, needless to say, were appreciated.

Dr. Tinney is different.

Where other dentists employ assistants to keep them company while they drill and scrape, Dr. Tinney keeps me entertained with his stories. And I don't mean that he merely rambles on to hear the sound of his own voice. That would be enough in itself for me to prefer the sound and fury of the drill. No, Dr. Tinney is actually a good storyteller. And he is a storyteller in the traditional sense. We can't have a traditional conversation, as my mouth is usually full of cotton, metal or his fingers. He talks. Occasionally I grunt a yes, no, or if there's nothing blocking my way, I answer or try to add something. But for the most part, Dr. Tinney performs a constant monologue. And I listen.

On a recent visit, the conversation turned to his days in medical school, where, to help pay his way, he used to work in the anatomy department cleaning up the body parts from the previous semester and setting up the rooms for the following class. It seems he had come upon this strange job because his father had been a mortician and young Dr. Edward Tinney was accustomed to being around cadavers. The man who Ed worked for was an old black man who had also been a mortician as a younger man and was now in charge of, among other things, the bodies. His name was Herman.

Within the dental college at Ed's university was a graduate clinic that dealt with orthodontia, dentures and whatnot. It was called the Herman Clinic named after some benefactor or another, presumably named Herman. Well rather than tell people that he spent his days off carting dead bodies around for an old black man to make ends meet, Ed simply told them that he worked in Herman's Clinic and let them believe he was working in the post graduate clinic.

Now working in Herman's clinic usually just meant gathering the various limbs and body parts, putting them into large gray tubs for Herman to take away. But one day Herman told Ed that his back was bothering him and asked if he would give him a hand carting the bodies to the basement.

Ed agreed and they wheeled the covered tubs into the elevator and made their way to the basement. The basement was of the sort you would expect in an old large institution like a medical school. Dark, full of strange noises and smells. Herman led him down a corridor and into a room that seemed to Ed to have been drug out of a bad horror movie.

In the center of the room was a large furnace. Herman walked to it, put on a thick leather glove and opened the heavy iron door. Then with no further fanfare or eulogy for the deceased, Herman started feeding the body parts into a furnace.

This is not your average dental chair conversation.

But that wasn't the only story I heard about Herman's clinic. On another visit, probably a cavity in my upper bicuspid, Dr. Ed told me about another adventure he and Herman had carting dead bodies around.

It seemed that on one occasion, Herman and young Ed had to transport the newly dead bodies to the Gross Anatomy room so that the incoming class would have something to dissect. They arrived in a truck of some sort with the bodies stacked in the back. It just so happened that there was a new security guard on duty that night, and he was bent on being all that he could be.

The guard insisted on seeing whatever it was that Herman and this young medical student wanted to bring into his building. Herman just shrugged and motioned for the guard to have a look for himself. As the guard stood and pulled up his pants, Herman gave Ed a little wink and followed the guard out to the truck.

Now according to Ed, the guard appeared to have just finished dinner, as there was an empty box of KFC(r) sitting on the guard's desk. They trio walked out to the loading dock and Herman and Ed watched as the guard opened up the back of the truck. The guard pulled his flashlight out of his utility belt and with an air of authority proceeded to pull back the plastic that covered their cargo.

What happened next was inevitable, I guess. This particular guard had not been around long enough to have become accustomed to what exactly goes on at medical school. The guard froze for second as if he could not believe what he was looking at. In fact, according to Dr. Ed, he thought it took awhile for the guard's mind to comprehend what he was looking at. Even at medical school, you really don't expect to see a truckload of dead bodies on your first night of duty.

The guard turned around about as white as the plastic that covered the bodies and proceeded to lose the entirety of his KFC dinner, chicken, biscuits, beans and all.

The drill whined, and I did my best not to laugh, as I was afraid Dr. Ed might put a hole in something other than what he intended. Dr. Ed asked me to sit up and spit, then finished by telling me that they never saw that guard again.
I understand that a lot of people bail out of medical school in the first few weeks. I guess it's no different with the guards.

You either have the stomach for it or you don't.

One other thing I should mention. For the first year or so I never saw what Dr. Ed looked like. He always wore both a mask over his mouth, as well as a clear plastic shield that covered most of his face. I got to thinking of him as the masked storytelling dentist of Cape May County. And that's just what he is.

So if you're ever near South Jersey and feel the need for a story told well, look up the good Dr. Tinney. He'll jab your gums, and drill your teeth, make you spit even though your lips have ceased to function properly, but you'll come away with more than just a healthy set of teeth and gums. Trust me.

Chickens In The Brothel

Jane wanted chickens. Live ones.

"Four of them," she told me matter-of-factly. She thought about it some more then said, "No six. Yes, six. And red."

"Six red chickens," I repeated, not looking up. We were having lunch outside, as it was an unseasonably warm day. I was trying to decide what I wanted to eat knowing full well that I would order the same thing I always did. I like to think that I want something new; that I truly want new experiences, but the truth is like most people, I'm happy in my usual ruts. They're comforting the way an old shirt is comforting. New is not always better.

"Yes," Jane said, "chickens." She said chickens as if that was the end of the conversation. I guess it was. Jane's my wife.

To be honest, I'd never really given chickens a lot of thought. I like to eat them - I like an omelet now and again, but that's about it. When I met Jane, she didn't even eat chicken. She was a vegetarian of sorts. She didn't have anything against eating animals; she just found that she felt better when she stuck to plants and fish. Now she wanted to raise chickens.

Of course it's not like one day she just looked up and said, "Honey. Pick me up a few live chickens on the way home." I mean I wasn't worried about finding her hovered over a little alter in our living room chanting in Spanish. We were buying a two hundred year-old house in the country and she wanted chickens. It seemed reasonable enough.

Up until then we'd been renting a home in Cape May and I don't think the neighbors, let alone the landlord, would have appreciated livestock. The truth is, Jane had always dreamed of owning chickens. "You know," she once told me, "just a few running around the yard while I'm gardening or hanging clothes." This did not seem to me to be a very sordid fantasy, nor anything that would have any real harmful effect on me, so I agreed. Besides, where we were moving, no one thought it particularly odd to want a few chickens hanging about.

The house we were buying was in a small town called Goshen, about twenty minutes north of Cape May. The owner, Mrs. Payne told us that her late husband had done research on the house and that it had once been a tavern and stagecoach stop in the mid 1800's. It had also functioned as a brothel at some time or another but this we learned from neighbors, and then only after we had already moved in. To some people this fact might have been unsettling. I thought it was the most interesting part and found it curious that it had not been part of the listing.

For Sale: Large four bedroom house. Two and a half bath. Hardwood floors. Yard with great gardening potential. Previously a whorehouse.

How could you pass that up? I figured it was the closest I'd ever get to a real brothel. Besides, what fun is buying any old house when you could live in an old whorehouse instead? I imagined Norm from This Old House walking through it saying, "Yes Jim. As you can see, this room is was where the Johns waited and over here in the front bedroom you can see where all that bouncing up and down has weakened the floor. We'll be working on that next week."

The house sat on the corner of Route 47 and Goshen Landing Road. Route 47 is a winding two-lane road that until the Garden State Parkway was built, was the main thoroughfare for vacationers traveling between Philadelphia and Cape May. Goshen Landing Road, as it's name suggests, dead-ends at what was once a large ship landing on the Delaware Bay. It's been many years since a ship could pull up to the end of Goshen Landing Road and the marsh has since crept in leaving only a narrow, winding channel. The bay is now about two miles out. To this day, however, you can still see the pilings from the old dock at low tide.

Goshen, as it turns out, with its then seemingly endless supply of Cedar, was quite the successful shipbuilding town. So, with sailors and shipbuilders on one side, and rich Philadelphians passing through on their way to vacation in Cape May on the other, the local tavern and stagecoach stop was probably a pretty busy place indeed. It even had a name: The Tavern House.

I began to imagine the sign we would have made. It would be a carved, wooden sign with The Tavern House in big gold letters and a red rooster in the middle.

The fly in the ointment, as it were, was that we were moving at the end of February and the chicks we had ordered at the local feed store would arrive at the end of March. This did not give me a great deal of time to acquire a chicken coop. First off, I wasn't sure whether we wanted to buy something or build something. Originally, I thought we might be able to convert a big doghouse or maybe a small shed but after looking at several of these I concluded that I could probably do a better job myself. I still needed to know a little more about chickens though.

In the weeks prior to packing and closing on the house, we attempted to learn as much as we could about chickens. We started out by doing a little field research. That is to say, we went to the zoo and watched the chickens.

Cape May County has a pretty good zoo for being a beach-resort town. They have most of the favorites: lions, tigers, bears, a few giraffe, buffalo, zebra, ostriches, and even monkeys. They also have 'farm animals.' These are animals you'd normally find in any children's zoo but I can't imagine what kind of farm they might come from. There are fancy chickens that look like they're ready to go to a Victorian ball, Vietnamese Pot-bellied pigs, Llamas, and a few goats. I guess cows and ordinary pigs just don't have the same kind of draw in a rural community. As far as I can tell, this is where the zoo makes most of its revenue.

Strategically stationed around the perimeter of the farm-animal exhibit are gumball machines filled with feed. Atlantic City is just forty-five minutes up the Parkway and if you've ever seen little old ladies fight over slot machines, you'll understand why they don't let anyone younger than eighteen in. Those old biddies wouldn't stand a chance against your average first-grader.

For your quarter, you get about twelve kernels of compressed feed pellets that look curiously like rabbit turds. The child will then take this little handful of gold over to the animal of their choice and either throw it at its head or drop the whole load the minute the poor, hungry animal tries to eat it. This usually means it drops on the wrong side of the fence so that the animal can't reach it. Which doesn't faze the child, who simply goes back to Dad and asks for more quarters. After all, what they really want to do is get the feed from the gumball machine. They feed it to the animals because that's what they know we adults want to see. Besides, they've been told at least a hundred times not to eat food that's been dropped on the ground.

This setup is brilliant. The animals don't spoil their appetite on vending machine junk food and the children have a rip-roaring time. Meanwhile, the chickens eat all the pellets dropped on the other side of the fence as soon as the noisy children clear out. Even the parents make out well since the zoo doesn't charge admission and this is a far more interesting, if not a more educational, use of a quarter than a video game at the arcade. Of course if the zoo people are smart, the gumball machines are filled with chicken feed in the first place. At the very least, we learned what chickens at the zoo eat.

In the end, we didn't actually learn a great deal about chickens, but we liked the look of them and enjoyed watching them strut around the yard. Our field research in hand, we headed for the library.

When I was a kid, my parents decided that our education wouldn't be complete without a set of World Book Encyclopedias. These were bought no doubt from a door-to-door salesman and sold personally to my father. My father is by nature the cheapest white man in North America. This doesn't stop him when it comes to innovative gadgets. He once bought a pair of scissors that could cut a penny. This was demonstrated by the salesman who sold it to him. What he learned later was that it was useless when it came to cutting ordinary things like paper or fabric but it was hell on small coins.

Along with the twenty or so volumes of World Book Encyclopedia came two huge dictionaries. One for A-K and one for L-Z. Anytime we had a question, my father would glibly announce, "Go look it up in the World Book." The same held true if we wanted to know how to spell something. There were no easy answers in our house and research became a big part of our educational process. So did quality plagiarism. I learned early on that if the school I was attending didn't happen to have the World Book Encyclopedia, but say only the Encyclopedia Britannica, you could plagiarize the hell out of the World Book. With a few opening sentences of my own and fine closing, I could fill the middle with fantastic information taken almost directly from the World Book. I owe a lot to the people at World Book and to them I am truly grateful.

In addition to his devotion to the World Book, my dad was also, and still is, a big believer in the free library. So we often made weekly trips to the library where we spent hours and left with armfuls of books. If you couldn't find it at the library, you probably didn't need it, was my father's attitude.

So Jane and I went to the library. We checked out nearly every book they had on the subject: from raising chicks to building coops. Much of the stuff on chickens had to do with raising large numbers of them, dealing with cannibalism, or killing them cleanly. We just wanted to raise six hens, maybe a rooster and get some fresh eggs. We did, in the end, learn what to expect from our chickens. Like when they would begin laying (5-6 months), how many eggs they would lay (about 18/month), how long they would lay productively (two years), what to feed them (chicken feed) and what they needed in terms of housing.

From reading the various books, I had gotten a general feel for what a standard coop contained. Several of the books referred to 'backyard' chickens or 'small flocks' by which they meant less than two hundred. The coops in these books were small barns designed to hold anywhere from fifty to two hundred chickens. We were talking about six chickens. So I went back to the library and found some books on building small sheds. These were far more helpful since a small shed was more of what I had in mind and the designs were for people who wanted an appealing structure to put their garden tools in. That is to say, they were really more ornamental than any chicken farmer would ever dream. This was what I had been looking for. A well-designed chicken coop that looked a lot like a Victorian garden shed. Soon after I began, Jane began referring to it as the Chicken Mansion.

The first time I saw the chickens, they weren't but two days old having been shipped via UPS from Iowa, peeping all the way. The Payne Sisters, as they were later to be called, were Rhode Island Reds, bright reddish-yellow balls of fuzz from which grew two feet. Mrs. Smeltzer fished them out in two scoops from a large fish tank that had been converted for the spring chicks.

For the next three weeks they lived in a cardboard box in our living room. The floor of the box was covered with shredded newspaper and contained a gallon watering jug and a small chick feeder. It was covered on top with chicken wire, not so much to keep them in as to keep the cat from having a midnight snack. Attached to the top of the box was a clamp-on lamp of the sort you might find in a mechanic's garage. It was outfitted with a large heat lamp that gave off a warm, red glow. In the weeks following, when I arrived home, the first thing I would see would be the red glow from the front living room window, somehow suggesting that these ladies, who now inhabited the front parlor of our whorehouse, were working much harder than eating, napping and shredding a little newspaper.

Now reading books in the library was all fine and well, but eventually I'd have to actually build the coop. Baby chicks grow quickly and after a few weeks it was clear that they weren't going to be able to live very long in our living room. They were going to need outdoor accommodations. And soon.

As I said, I had looked into converting a doghouse or a ready-made shed but decided against it. The truth is, I'm a graphic designer by trade - I ought to be able to do this, I reasoned. My only fear was inexperience. I had just never built anything before.

I started by drawing my grand design on graph paper using several plans for garden sheds as a rough guide. Once I was happy with what I thought would be a very practical, yet classy chicken coop, I figured out what materials I would need and called in an order to the local lumber yard. If I had gone to Home Depot, I could have probably figured the whole thing out myself because, for the most part, I knew what everything was supposed to look like, but ordering over the phone to someone used to talking to lumberjacks, was going to be a little more difficult. So when I called, I started out by telling him that I was an idiot and was building a chicken coop.

"Uh-huh," he said like this was his third call that morning from an idiot building a chicken coop.

"Well, basically I know what I want but I need a little help deciding on a few things. I was hoping maybe you could help me out."

"Uh-huh."

I pictured him gesturing to his buddies and switching me over to the intercom system to the entire lumberyard.

"Okay...first I need 10 sixteen foot 1x6" tongue and groove pine boards and 2 10 foot boards."

"This is for a chicken coop, right?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Just checking."

I gave him the rest of the materials and with some help figured out which nails I would need and how many, as well as the proper choice for the cedar shingles I was looking for.

"Cedar shingles?"

"Yes," I assured him.

"This is for the chicken coop still?"

"Yes."

"Well, we have some hand-cut cedar shingles. They ain't all that straight though. It's the kind the of thing you'd put on a dog house so I guess it'd be good enough for chickens."

"How much are they?" I asked.

"Let's see. A bundle will run you $6.50."

"How much do think I'd need?"

"Depends."

I waited for him to tell me what this depended on. He didn't.

"Depends on what?" I finally asked.

"How big your roof is."

"Oh, right. Four by eight. Single pitch."

"Two bundles ought to do you."

I was told the order would be delivered between 8 and 9 Saturday morning. The bill came to $252.38. These had better be some damn good chicken eggs, I thought.

Saturday morning came and at eight o'clock sharp I heard the sound of a truck backing up. I was still in bed so I jumped up, dressed quickly and went downstairs to sign for the load. An old black man was walking to the door. I remember thinking he looked a little old to be hauling wood. I wished him a good morning, signed for the order and followed him out to his truck. It appeared as if my load was the only order on his truck. I motioned to a spot in the back yard where I wanted him to put the lumber and he backed the truck up over the lawn to where I now stood. He crawled out of the cab, pulling on some old leather, work gloves and began undoing the thick web straps that held the lumber tightly in place. As soon as both straps were free he slid one end of the load out off the side of the truck's bed. It was all stacked neatly and bound with metal strips. What he did next nearly gave me a heart attack. He grabbed the other side, gave a quick tug then jumped nimbly out of the way. The whole load, all two hundred and fifty-two dollars and thirty-eight cents worth, came crashing down onto the ground with a loud slap. I very nearly cried out. Of course the lumber wasn't hurt, but I just assumed he was going to take it off the truck piece by piece and stack it neatly in a pile. In fact, the real reason I'd gone out with him to the back yard in the first place was that I figured I'd help this poor old man unload my lumber. I had no idea he was just going to push it off the edge.

Now if there's one important lesson I've learned over the years, it's that when venturing into uncharted territory, do so alone. You're less likely to look stupid. This falls under the If A Tree Falls In The Forest And No One's Around To Hear It clause. It's bad enough that I didn't know what I was doing, I didn't need some jokester looking over my shoulder and telling me that I was doing it wrong.

I've also found that as long as I go slowly, think about what I'm doing before I do it, and measure everything twice before I cut, I pretty much do okay. All told, I built the coop over the course of two weekends with little or no snags. I learned a few things, of course and if I ever build another chicken coop, there will be some things I'll do differently. But all in all, I was quite proud of my little achievement. Without a doubt, it was the best looking chicken coop I'd ever seen. I'll spare you the actual details of the construction but suffice it to say, this coop could withstand hurricane-force winds. I built it with the notion that if I could build a small chicken coop properly, I could also manage a larger structure like the workshop/potting shed that Jane and I dreamed of. Therefore, I went to a lot of extra and unnecessary trouble in order to learn how to build a proper structure.

A week after the coop was finished, with the help of my sister-in-law's boyfriend, I dug post-holes and put up a chicken wire enclosure surrounding the chickens. We also spread deer netting across the top to keep the chickens in and the hawks out. That night the chicks slept in their new home. They had upgraded from newspaper to wood shavings by now, but they still had their heat lamp. Each morning I would go out and open the little front door that folded down on hinges to become a ramp and they would spill out on top of one another.

For the next several weeks, Jane would find me sitting on a little folding seat in the middle of the chicken yard. It was spring and the weather was warming up. The sun would be shining, I'd have a beer in hand, and I'd just sit there and watch them run around the yard. They didn't do a whole hell of a lot, but that was okay. I wasn't doing much either according to Jane.

At five weeks old, the birds had already lost most of their chick fuzz and were now almost completely covered with red feathers. The only remaining fuzz was on their heads. They operated as a group, foraging here, running over there. If one chick found itself all of a sudden alone, it would begin peeping loudly with the other chicks peeping in return until the lost chick found the group. If one chick found something good to eat, the other chicks would chase it around trying the steal whatever it was. A hierarchy quickly formed with the largest chick being able to hold her own against the onslaught of thieves.

While there were slight differences of course, each of the chicks on it's own looked pretty much like all the others. If you could have kept them all still and put them in a lineup, you could probably have pointed out distinguishing marks. As it was, they never stood still and trying to pick one out and remember what it looked like was a little like trying to follow a single falling snowflake.

There was one exception. As I said, one of the chicks was demonstrably bigger than the others. Ricky claimed this one for himself. We had gotten six chicks because that was the minimum you could order, but we had along the way decided that this would give us each a chick plus one for my niece, Isabel who was about a year old.

Ricky's chicken, which was never named, continued to be larger than the rest for quite awhile, but then one day, we couldn't even distinguish her anymore. Now we simply had six chickens. We have a tradition of naming animals after people we know and we already had a canary named Mr. Clapsaddle. In the truth is stranger than fiction category, Mr. Clapsaddle had actually come from a little Pennsylvania-Dutch woman named Mrs. Clapsaddle. With this in mind, since we had bought our home from Mrs. Payne, we decided that at least one of the hens would be named Mrs. Payne. When it became apparent that we would never be able to tell them apart, they all became Mrs. Payne. Or the Payne Sisters as we would refer to them collectively.

Now the way we figured it, if you're going to live in the country and have chickens, you've got to have a rooster. The rooster IS living in the country. When we first told people we wanted chickens they would say things like, "Why?" Fifty years ago, people had chickens. No one asked them why. It was obvious enough, I suppose. Meat or eggs. What the hell else would you do with a chicken? I don't think any of the people who asked us "why" were concerned with whether or not we were interested in them primarily for meat or eggs. They simply couldn't fathom anyone wanting to own live chickens when you can buy perfectly good dead ones prepackaged in the grocery store for less than two dollars a pound. For that matter, you can buy a dozen eggs for a little over a dollar. Chickens indeed.

While it's true that many of the people who were incredulous at the notion of our raising chickens were from the city, or at least not the country, even the country folk were a little perplexed when we told them we wanted a rooster but that we weren't really interested in killing him for meat or in acquiring more chickens. In fact at one point we figured we'd get a rooster and simply get him castrated. A castrated rooster is called a capon. Once castrated, they fatten quicker and so make great roasters. We weren't exactly sure who we were going to get to castrate him because "chicken castrator" wasn't something we'd seen in the local newspaper's work needed section. I offered to try to learn how but Jane informed me I'd be more likely to cut off his head by mistake or remove his appendix. I didn't need any more tools anyway.

Regardless of whether or where we going to get his procedure done, we had to find him first. People who understood the purpose for chickens at least understood our desire for hens but when it came to our reasons for our rooster, even they were stumped.

"Why would you want a rooster if you don't want more chickens," one farmer asked my wife.

"We just want one," my wife replied pleasantly.

"You know they crow all the time."

"Yes. That's part of the attraction."

It was then he realized that he was dealing with someone who lacked all common sense. I should point out that I wasn't even there.

"I mean all the time," he continued. "Not just in the morning like on television. They crow at four in the morning and at four in the afternoon. Some crow all night."

"That's okay," she said. "We just like the way they sound anyway."

Needless to say, he shrugged and walked away. You just can't reason with some people.

Later, we decided we did want more chickens and you can't really tell the difference between a fertilized egg and a non fertilized egg unless you incubate them, so why not. They taste the same and are impossible to tell apart physically. Meanwhile the rooster gets to have a little fun. I don't say that to sound sexist. The hen is obviously involved. She just doesn't seem to be having that much fun. It looks more like she's being pinned by a WWF wrestler. Maybe someday hens may be liberated but until then it looks a lot more like duty rather than pleasure for the hen.

If you want fertilized eggs, you need approximately one rooster for every one hundred hens. Polygamy is very much alive and well in the chicken house. And since roosters don't lay eggs they aren't really all that useful. Most people don't want roosters. They want hens. Now I don't know what they do with all the unwanted roosters, but we couldn't find one for the life of us. All we wanted was one rooster. After all, we only had six hens. He would only be working part-time anyway.

We went to farmer's markets looking for roosters and there wouldn't be any. At least not the kind we wanted. A Rhode Island Red. And they're only about the most common chicken out there.

Finally, we ran into a woman named Joyce at a friend's party who said she had three, one-year old cocks and we could have all three if we wanted. We told her no thank you but we were already afraid that one rooster would leave our hens oversexed. One would be quite enough. She told us to come by the next week and we could pick one up. They weren't Rhode Island Reds but beggars can't be choosy. They did turn out to be beautiful Buff Cochins. Glorious gold-colored cocks with a large plume of tail feathers.

It just so happened that I had a dentist appointment that next week and my dentist is only a few doors away from where Joyce lives. I called her and asked if it would be all right if we picked up our rooster. She said she'd try and catch one before I got there but I may have to give her a hand. Her husband was usually the one who caught them for her and he was away.

After my dentist appointment, I stopped by her house and we walked to the back yard together. There were three large, golden roosters milling about and she grabbed a large net that happened to be hanging off a small shed. It was the kind of net you see dogcatchers in cartoons use. Long handle and a big hooped net. I kept waiting for her to laugh and say she was just kidding. She didn't. She carried the net and looked fierce. I followed and tried to look fierce too. I had glimpses of Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet chasing Hufalumps.

With the help of her three small children, we managed to chase the roosters around the yard, never coming closer than twenty feet or so before they would tear ass across the yard in another direction. It soon became evident that we weren't going to catch a rooster so we stopped to talk. We discussed her horse, gardening and chickens and were pretty much ignoring the roosters so they wandered back in our general direction. To be honest, I had no idea of this at the time. But as I was in the middle of a sentence, Joyce's expression changed and she practically shoved me out of the way and with the speed and dexterity of a tribal warrior, lunged with her net and bagged a rooster. Since it was obvious that she was the hunter, I assumed the role of the gatherer and gathered a big plastic tub and a large piece of cardboard with which to cover it. Joyce grabbed the rooster, dropped him in the tub as I slapped the cardboard over the top. We proceeded to duct-tape the cardboard to the tub while Joyce poked some rather large air holes through the top. The air holes seemed a little excessive to me seeing that our contraption was anything but airtight and we were only traveling about fifteen minutes. The duct-tape was crucial though. The last thing I wanted to see was a live rooster flapping around the inside of my car. I heard a story once about a man who while hunting shot a turkey. Assuming it was dead, he threw it in the back of his car and proceeded to drive home. At some point, the turkey, who must have been familiar with professional wrestling sprang back to life and proceeded to squawk and flap about the back of this fierce hunter's car. Unfortunately for the hunter, he had left his shotgun in the back seat as well and the turkey inadvertently pulled the trigger, shooting the hunter in the leg.

While I didn't have a shotgun in the back seat, I wasn't taking any chances. After all, this rooster may have been on some Fresh Air program and was packing heat. You just never know.

We got the box settled in the back seat and I said thanks and goodbye and as I closed my door and turned to back out of the driveway, I saw the rooster looking me dead in the eye. One of the extra large air holes was right in the middle of the top of the box and the rooster had stuck his head right up through the middle. And that's how we rode home. Russell and I.

We named him Russell after Bertram Russell. He's very sure of himself and you understand where the term cock of the walk comes from. He does, after all have six wives.

Like everyone told us he would, Russell starts crowing at 4:30am and then again any other time of the day he feels like it. We love it. In the summer, when we sleep with the windows open, I sometimes hear him while in a state of half-sleep where dreams mix with reality. His voice comes to me through my dreams, not as a disturbance, but as accompaniment to the soft music of sleep. He reminds me that I live in a world far away from car alarms and police sirens. I sleep fifty yards from a little house where chickens lay warms, perfectly shaped eggs into clean, white pine shavings.

I wake early; pulling on my duck boots and walk out to find the chickens already up and foraging. I gather what eggs are there, some of them warm from just being laid, others cold from having spent the night alone. I listen to the early song of birds, and the clucking of the hens. Russell, lifting his chest and balancing forward as if on his toes will break the solitude with a hearty cock-a-doodle-doo, and the sun rises.