Funky Chickens

I have a little Texan friend named Penny. Nothing amuses me more than to hear her tell a tale, or to listen to her rant when she gets all riled up about something...it's just plain funny.

I've known Penny for a while...we'd been neighbors in the town I live in now, when we first moved there, eleven years ago. Then she and her husband, Ray, moved out to the Country and I hardly saw her anymore. Then, O Joy of Joys, WE found a place out in the country, too....only two minutes away from Penny's place...(she and I timed it).

Not only was she interesting to listen to; she was interesting to observe. I was at Penny's home one day around lunch time. She has four kids; and school was out for the summer so they were all there for the day. She lined up the herd at thier bar stools and was 'fixin' to feed them. We gabbed while she made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, lining them up on the countertop. Before she handed each one to the designated kid, she stood up on her tip-toes, and with both hands, put all of her weight onto the sandwich...in a move similar to CPR.

I was amazed...why would someone take a perfectly good sandwich, and flatten it like that...was this some weird kind of a punishment? Had this kid made her mad or something? But I watched, mouth agape, as she did it again a second, third, and fourth time. When I found my voice I croaked out, "Wh....wh....WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO THOSE????"

Penny turned around, calm as a summer's morning, and spoke to me as if she were talking about clipping coupons or some such task, "They're smashed sandwiches." And she left it at that, and continued on with our previous conversation. But I couldn't leave it alone.

"Why did you smash the sandwiches?"

"They're 'Smashed Sandwiches'," she said again.

"But....WHY?"

Penny looked at me like, 'doesn't everyone do this?' and said, "The kids won't eat them if they're not smashed. They don't like the fluffy bread. It makes them gag."

I didn't know what else to say. I told my kids about it, and they tried it....but flat bread makes THEM gag.

Not long after the smashed sandwhich incident, Penny began talking about things they used to do as children at her family home in Texas for fun. She mentioned hypnotising the chickens.

"WHAT?....." I gasped, "You're kidding me...you can't hypnotize....foul....!"

"Yes you can, we did it all the time," she drawled.

Since we had chickens at our house, I asked her to come over and show me, for proof. She was over in two minutes. None of our children were around to witness two mommies leaning over a chicken, performing an odd experiment. But this was what it was like to hang out with Penny....we did strange things all the time, and while I'd be laughing to myself, she always thought it was 'normal'....part of her charm.

"....So ya go like this..." she was saying, holding a chicken's head down to the gravel driveway's surface, "You draw a line right in front of it for a while, real slow-like, in the dirt. Just keep doin' that over 'n' over, 'n' the chicken's eyes'll git real glassy-like..." She ran her finger in the dirt repeatedly. I was skeptical; waiting for the punchline....I just knew it was some sort of a joke she was playing on me, Penny was like that.

But after a moment, she stopped drawing in the dirt and took her other hand off the chicken's head. It stayed there. It wasn't moving. I could see that it was still breathing, but other than that; still as a statue. One of the more amazing things I've seen in my lifetime, really. She stood up, rubbing her hands together, proudly.

"See, I told ya I could do it," she said, "NOW, it's very important to know how to 'snap' them out of it...er else y'all will just have this zombie chicken runnin' around yer yard..."

And with that, she leaned down close to the chicken's head again, and suddenly clapped her hands loudly together, while simultaneously shouting out, "YOU'RE A CHICKEN!"

The chicken 'came to', shook its head a few times, and walked away like a drunken sailor.

I tried it again, on a different chicken, once Penny drove away. I just had to see if I could hypnotize an animal. I could.

But my rathermost large mistake was that of sharing my newfound skill with the kids, who began hypnotizing chickens left and right. When we got our chickens, we had twelve. After the hypnotizing tutorial; we had two.

It seemed that one fateful night when I allowed the kids to sleep out in the yard on the trampoline in the delightfully warm summer weather, TJ got the bright idea to hypnotize them, all at once. Jordan and Sis were accomplices. They did very well, hypnotized ten at a time (they couldn't find the other two)...they just forgot that one little detail of waking them back up. By morning, there were feathers and beaks scattered all over the lawn....the foxes must have thought they'd died and gone to Heaven when they happened upon our yard. There were ten sitting 'ducks' (chickens, in actuality) for them to 'feast till they couldn't feast no more' on.

"HOW could you have slept through the slaughter of TEN animals, just a few feet from where you were?" I asked, bewildered. "What, are you ZOMBIES or something?"

".....no, we were....hypnotized!'

Oh, good grief. Who is your mother again? Didn't you say her name was....Penny?