Once I put a feather in the ground and tried to grow a chicken

When I was a boy, my dad had a great saying he would use when I responded to a parental inquiry with “well…I thought I did!” He would unfailingly reply, “Thought put a feather in the ground and thought he’d grow a chicken.”  I loved that saying.  It made me think.  As an adult looking back I know fully what he meant.  He wanted honesty, not an attempt at misdirection.  Thought put a feather in the ground and thought he’d grow a chicken.

I think of that little mental scratch tally often.  It’s logged in my brain with many others.  As a child I can remember really mulling that one over, alone in my thoughts, at first visualizing a man burying a feather with fowl  hopes.  I admit I even tried it.  I did not grow a chicken, at least, not in the time frame my short attention span could wait for one to grow.  Another time, sitting on my haunches playing in the back yard with a tiny spade, my dad asked what I was doing.  I answered plainly that I was digging a hole.  He replied with, “well don’t go too deep.  I don’t want the bloody Chinese climbing out.”  That little number changed my thought process immediately.  Of course I started to dig faster.  I tried to guess whether I would come though at a hole in the sky, looking down on a Chinese town, or if I would pop up somewhere at ground level. 

Later at the age or five or maybe six, my dad drove a 1969 Chrysler Valiant.  In the center of the dash was a mono speaker for the AM radio, covered by a grill, held on with a center screw.  While waiting in the car alone one day in a parking lot I noticed that the screw was loose and sticking up a little.  I started to fool around with it, twisting left and right with tiny fingers.  When dad got back in the car he took one look at what I was doing and said, “hey!  Don’t play with that.”  I tried to explain that it was loose but he would not listen.  “That’s the center screw for the whole car.  If you pull it out all the parts on the car will fall off on the road!”   I was horrified.  I begged to tighten it but he just smiled and said to leave it alone.  For weeks, that center screw held my terrified attention as it vibrated loosely in its place on the dashboard.  Every bump in the road filled my imagination with scenarios of a disintegrating automobile, the entire family out on the roadway scrambling for loose car parts before they were scattered by passing tires.

Looking back on those memories I can only smile.  Dad still likes to spout the ridiculous, but I'm not nearly as gullible.  It’s amazing to think how literally a mind can take something that we later grow up to know as fantasy.  Thought put a feather in the ground and thought he’d grow a chicken.  It’s hilarious really, but how very seriously I readily I took it as fact.  The parallels in society today are staggering. How many of us take the stories of our youth, the fantastic fantasies designed to impart some moral imperative or value and assign real life hope and personal truth.  I know very well that I cannot grow a chicken, not matter how much I would like it to be true.  I know that if I dig a hole there is little danger in the “bloody Chinese” climbing out.  And I know that it would take more than a loose speaker grill to stop a Valiant…maybe not much more…but still.  In the same way I know the silliness of many of the other stories of my childhood.  What a hold they have had on my imagination, hope and personal truth. 

There is joy in understanding.  There is freedom in thought.  As a small boy, eyes wide and mind ready, even a father’s sense of humor appeared to speak the truth about my tiny universe as I knew it.  I can remember one afternoon, while washing the Valiant with dad, bringing up the question of the loose screw.  He looked at me with some surprise and smiled again.  “You do know I was just pullin ya leg mate,” and went back to washing the car.  Wow,  I was relieved.  I was relieved because I understood a thing.  It was obvious.  I wondered at how I had not seen it before.  Of course he was joking.  Of course a tiny screw in the center of the dash does not hold the entire car together.  Of course you can’t put the entire collection of earth’s animals two by two on a wooden boat…….Hey!  Wait a minute!....