It’s time for a classic Wojo’s World. Enjoy this popular column from a couple of years ago.
I’ve been writing this column for over a decade. Often, friends and readers say, “Did that really happen?”
And I respond, “Life is hilarious. You just can’t make this stuff up.”
Thus begins this week’s column…
I was recently coming out of an office building after a professional meeting. My assistant was with me. I was walking to the car, and I got about halfway across the parking lot, when I noticed something walking across it, going in the opposite direction.
It was a chicken.
You read that right: a chicken.
Not a dog.
Not a cat.
Not even a mouse or rat or some other vermin.
A chicken.
I was so stunned that I literally (and that means I actually did this, as opposed to figuratively, which would mean that I hadn’t—sorry I’m a member of the Grammar Police, and this distinction is important to me…but, um, I digress), and I mean literally, stopped in my tracks.
My assistant nearly ran into the back of me. “What’s wrong?” he asked me.
“Um, do you see that chicken?” I asked.
“What chicken?” he replied.
My assistant is a funny man.
Funny, funny, funny…
Suffice it to say that he saw this chicken too.
We weren’t in a rural area. And, let me remind you, we had just walked out of an office building.
As we looked around to try and figure out where the chicken had come from, the chicken, let’s call her Clara, kept walking across the parking lot. Because there was a busy road at the end of it, I wanted to figure out where she belonged–and soon.
Ernie decided that perhaps the people who lived in the house next door to the office building would know about the chicken. We looked, and while they didn’t have a coop in their backyard, they might know where Clara belonged.
While he went to the house to ask, I followed Clara. I didn’t want her to end up as road kill because she somehow broke out of a coop and made a break for it.
Can you imagine?
Freedom! Smash…
No, I didn’t want to see that happen.
I’m a city girl, born and raised. So seeing a chicken walking across a parking lot was interesting, mysterious, and pretty cool.
Until I decided to call it…
Know, dear reader, that I really didn’t know if one could “call” a chicken or not. I’ve never owned one. I’ve never touched one—well, unless it was on a plate, and that, in this case, doesn’t count.
Since Clara was now getting a bit too close to the road, and I had no idea if she would “make a run for it” and get run over, I began to do that clicking noise that we make with our mouths when we call a dog.
I didn’t expect it to work.
Well, it did. And with the little bit of clicking I did, Clara turned, eyed me up for a moment, and then began to run—and I mean RUN—straight for me.
As I said, I grew up in the city, so I handled this as calmly as any city folks would. I screamed.
“Ernie! The chicken is running toward me!” I yelled.
My mind began to go on full force—will she peck me? Will she try to fly up into my arms? And then the dreaded—Oh my God, can chickens have rabies?
I could see it now: me calling my husband from the emergency room.
“Honey, what’s wrong?” he’d ask.
“I have to get shots for rabies,” I’d reply.
“Oh no! Did a dog bite you?”
“Nope. I got attacked by Clara the chicken in the parking lot of an office building.”
By this time, Ernie had come back over. Clara had stopped right in front of me and was looking up as though to say, “Well, whaddya want?”
Ernie, who has grown up on farmland for a lot of his life, assured me that Clara wouldn’t peck me. And she wouldn’t carry rabies.
In fact, he picked her up and carried her back to the house he had gone to. She was their chicken.
The man who came to the door, took Clara from Ernie while thanking him, then took her into the house, and shut the door.
He took the chicken into the house.
Into. The. House!
I decided that this moment had gotten weird enough. I didn’t want to know if Clara was a pet or if they had a coop in their house.
I got in the car and decided not to speak of this again. Until now…
Even though I met Clara, she didn’t clear up why she was crossing the parking lot or whether the egg came first or not.
I guess some things just need to remain a mystery.
Michele Wojciechowski, when she’s not still pondering why in the world that chicken was in the parking lot, writes Wojo’s World® from Baltimore.
She’s also the author of the award-winning book Next Time I Move, They’ll Carry Me Out in a Box. You can connect with Wojo on Facebook or on Twitter.
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