Domestic Lives: Chicken Vanishes, Heartbreak Ensues
THE chickens of New York City, for the most part, live fairly sheltered lives, securely tucked into private backyards and padlocked community gardens. Our chickens, by contrast, are public figures — their yard faces 20 feet of busy Bedford-Stuyvesant sidewalk. The chickens themselves chose this bustling thoroughfare, decamping there even when they could have settled in our spacious, semiprivate back garden. They wanted to see and be seen — like so many New York transplants, they seemed to feed on the energy of the street.
Damon Winter/The New York Times
Damon Winter/The New York Times
When Gertrude, right, was taken, neighbors in Bedford-Stuyvesant were disconsolate. Any theft deals a blow to one’s faith in humanity.
The admirers came in droves. The neighborhood immortalized by Biggie Smalls and Billy Joel has undergone widespread gentrification, and between the trend-conscious newcomers from suburbia and the nostalgic migrants from the Caribbean and rural South, there’s an awful lot of chicken love in Bed-Stuy these days.
And what’s not to love? There’s something intrinsically happy about a chicken. The name: a tiny hiccup in the mouth. The shape: a jaunty upswing of feathers, a grin. The ceaseless bobbing, scratching, pecking. It’s almost impossible to feel melancholy in the company of chickens. They are a balm for the weary urban soul.
The spirit of the chicken regularly infects the sidewalk parade down Franklin Avenue. People break out in chicken dances. They cluck. They coo. They cock-a-doodle-doo. (One toddler ventured a tentative “oink, oink” before her mom gently corrected her.) Chickens make people loose, and they make them gregarious. In fair weather, scarcely an hour passes without a motley assortment of gawkers at our gate — dog-walkers, corner guys, stroller pushers — eager to inform, or misinform, one another on the finer points of chickendom. We’ve considered posting an F.A.Q. sheet — yes, they’re hens; no, they don’t need a rooster to make eggs — but that would spoil the fun. People like working it out among themselves.
In a neighborhood fraught with the tensions of gentrification, making people speak to one another, and speak about something other than themselves, is not an insignificant accomplishment. What I’m saying is that these chickens are important in a way that chickens aren’t usually important. They are Bed-Stuy’s very own peace doves.
Imagine our dismay last June, then, when Gertrude, a Rhode Island Red and our prize layer, was stolen.
The chicken yard was a classic crime scene: Coop open. Hatch lying on the ground. T-Rex, Gertrude’s long-suffering subordinate, standing dumbfounded.
After much deliberation, we called the police, so we’d at least be alerted if her corpse turned up within their purview. They came, laughed, snapped photos of T-Rex with their cellphones, and texted them to friends.
We decided to appeal to Gertrude’s public. We posted a huge sign on the gate, letting people know what had happened, and pleading for her return, no questions asked.
As with any theft, the worst part is the blow it deals to one’s faith in humanity. The chickens were in danger of being demoted from goodwill ambassadors to harbingers of doom, canaries in the neighborhood coal mine.
The sidewalk confabs reached a fever pitch. People were devastated.
A man with a neck tattoo shook his head and tut-tutted, “What kind of person would do something like this?” A woman in a church hat encouraged us to turn to God. Neighbors posted another sign: “439 Franklin misses Gertrude!” People scribbled commiseration. (“My son is sad! Find Gertrude!”) The crime was taken as proof of the decline and fall of civilization, and we found ourselves assuming the role of the comforter far more than the comforted.
Again, this is Bed-Stuy. Not Mayberry. Yet the response was more suited to a town with less in the way of a police blotter. Such dramatic emotional outpourings for a lost chicken seemed frankly disproportionate, since you can hardly walk a block in this town without being offered some tantalizing version of dead chicken. And since your average American consumes more than 80 pounds of poultry a year, the odds were good that most of the mourners had eaten a chicken in the last few days, if not hours.
But I digress. Back to the crime scene.
More source:
Chicken Vanishes, Heartbreak Ensues - NYTimes.com'Home' - Movie Review - NYTimes.com
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Submited at Friday, February 4th, 2011 at 1:00 am on House by admin
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