Patrizia and Her Performing Chicken

Yesterday morning, I went off for a plot showing at the New Paltz Community Garden.

I saw several lovely plots, but in the end I chose this one becawwwwwse the gardener before me had left me her hose! Plus, it has several upraised beds:



That's one thing I don't like about the New Paltz Community Garden: They make you water your garden with your own individually purchased hose. In fact, I dislike that so much that I argued the point with Phil, the extremely nice plot coordinator who was showing me around: "Hoses are not cheap! So by making that a requirement, you're essentially eliminating low-income gardeners who might really benefit from growing their own food."

Phil made a thoughtful face. "You're not wrong."

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Afterwards, I had an hour and a half to kill, so I hung out at the Gardiner Bakehouse:



The Gardiner Bakehouse is the café part of a complex run by a local maker's guild. Wonderful coffee & excellent food. Pastries to die for! It's the last place Brian & I hung out in together; in fact, we actually had a date to do an open mike there Saturday night of the week he died.

I was so happy sitting there! Sipping coffee, people watching, dipping into my novel from time to time to read a few paragraphs.

This is how you need to live your life! I told myself. With ample access to the Gardiner Bakehouse. You need to move to New Paltz.

New Paltz, you see, is the last hippie enclave in the entire United States.

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At Montgomery Schlock, I took on the task of doing taxes for an adorable kid who had started his own trucking business, but who had failed to draft a business plan or keep a single record of his business expenses.

After half an hour or so, I got up from my desk & toddled off to consult with the office manager.

"You can't do it?" she asked.

"Oh, I can do it," I said. "The question is whether I should do it, given the fact that I'm a first-year associate and this is going to require some intense forensic accounting. I'm not certified to do it, and that's going to raise some liability issues if the return is audited, which it almost certainly will be."

The office manager didn't seem to understand the difference between "can" and "should," which was mildly annoying but whatevs: I do not give a shit what these people understand or think so long as I get paid.

###

Back at the casa, I hunted down Icky. "The chickens... ?"

Icky looked grim. "Something got them. I found some feathers next to the coop. They got Little Nas—"

"Little Nas" is his name for Black Chicken.

Oh, my heart was broken. Black Chicken! Whom I'd taught to jump high and walk backwards when I first moved into this place. Whom I could have taken out on the road as a circus act, Patrizia and Her Performing Chicken.

I sat in the Patrizia-torium sobbing. Black Chicken! People are dying in Gaza! I reminded myself fiercely. It doesn't take much to see that the problems of one black chicken don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.

Half an hour later, Icky began calling my name. "Patrizia! Patrizia! Patrizia!"

I ran downstairs—

He was holding Black Chicken!!!

Black Chicken had survived!!!

"Where was she?"

"She was just standing there on the back porch when I opened the door—"

Clearly, something had tried to grab her: She was missing a whole bunch of feathers under her right wing. I visualized a fox's mouth.

But she had gotten away! I pictured her pecking furiously at the fox until he dropped her and then fluttering away to hide. Nobody's getting Black Chicken without a fight! Black Chicken is a survivor!!! Descendent of the mighty dinosaurs!

There are now three chickens left.

"You've got to build them some sort of run," I told Icky. "Free ranging is a nice concept, but it's simply not safe for them."

He is leaving to go back down to the city today, but I think he will build one next time he's up.

In the meantime, the chickens must be confined to their coop.