Off The Beaten Path - In Consideration of Haddam's Town Bird by Kristin Ahearn

rooster
Chickens, I have decided, are the unofficial “town bird” here in Haddam. If you don’t have your own backyard coop, you know someone who does. Fresh eggs are swapped among friends, and eagerly sold at roadside stands and at the wildly popular Higganum Village Market.

Pet chickens of prize varieties—Bantams, Rhode Island Reds, Campines—are on full display at the Haddam Neck Fair. They’re pretty, they’re productive, and they live outside.
It’s easy to see why a growing number of people, like me, secretly harbor great desires to have a corral of happy cluckers pouring out all around the backyard.
Chicken owners are a smiling bunch. They often don “Wellies”, boots purposefully designed for handling animal droppings. They frequent the Higganum Feed Store and have lots of good stories involving coyotes. They are hands-on with nature.
Although we are a family with zero tolerance for pets (we are riddled with the sneezing gene), we do appreciate the valuable lessons that come from the care and feeding of livestock. While my own children have never scooped poop or seen their parents cry over a $600 vet bill, they have formed close bonds with our neighbor’s animals. I often see them running around our yard trying to catch bunnies or put leashes on frogs. Sadly, I’ve even spied my youngest daughter trying to cuddle up with a salamander.
For the sake of these children, something needs to be done here. So, I decided to learn a little bit more about raising our town bird.
Perhaps this was a pet we could handle. (Read the Whole Story)

Car Keys - The Sequel by Peter Kushkowski

Prologue: The earlier Car Keys essay left readers wondering what happened on that fateful Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, 1988, in New York City when car keys were inadvertently left hanging from the trunk of our car parked at the curb on Park Avenue. This account is the “story I’d rather save for another day”, twenty–two years later.

keys-in-lock
Oblivious that my set of car keys was dangling from my car’s trunk, our four-some walked up Park Avenue to W 57th Street for an honest-to- goodness New York Jewish deli breakfast at Wolf ’s Deli. From there we continued along W 57th to the first item on our agenda—the eleven o’ clock Sunday morning service at Calvary Baptist Church.
It was as we stood for the benediction that I reflexively patted my pants pocket where I usually carry the car keys. That initial pat-down was my first indication that something was not right. I began patting the rest of my pockets, becoming desperate as successive slaps came up empty.
Leaning over to my wife Salme I whispered frantically, “I don’t have my car keys!”
“You probably locked them inside,” she whispered back reassuringly, “but don’t worry, I have mine.”
Acting on that assumption, we ducked down into the nearest subway station, spinning through the turnstiles toward uptown to our event du jour—the touring exhibit of Dutch/Flemish paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Fine Art.
But the missing keys gnawed on me. As we waited for the next subway train I informed our party that I couldn’t continue with this uncertainty. The mystery of the missing keys could only be resolved for me by going back to the car. I offered to go it alone, and catch up with the gang at the museum, but they wouldn’t hear of it.
We four hot-footed it back toward the car. Craning our necks to look into the distance as we sped along the side- walks we encouraged each other with shouts of, “The car’s still there! The car’s still there!!”
A quick once-around-the-car found no keys hanging from exterior door or trunk locks. A thorough search of the interior, after unlocking the car with my wife’s set of keys, was fruitless.
The only plausible theory remaining was that the keys had to be inside the trunk. Up went the trunk lid. Down went our spirits.
The trunk was stripped bare of its contents.
Gone were our jackets, the coffee carafes, tools... everything! Except for one work glove. This led to speculation that, whatever else, the thief was also a Michael Jackson impersonator.
After scouring nearby garbage cans, and peering down into storm water catch-basins in the vicinity of the car for the keys, we concluded that someone had made off with them, and was perhaps trying to sell the keys for drug money. (I read recently where a person did just that—sold a stolen Honda for only $25 drug money!)
What to do? We drove the car blocks away to another neighborhood, parked it at the curb, and resumed with our original, albeit delayed, plans for the day.
At the end of the day, over Fettuccine Alfredo in an Italian restaurant at Citicorp Place, we agreed that our viewing the exhibit of Dutch/Flemish paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Fine Art had been well worth all the aggravation.