Father's Daze

Cacciatore is dead, long live Parmesan! And Original, Extra Crispy, Barbecue, Nuggets, Fingers, Popcorn, Filet and Patty.

The census at the Feldner Chicken Ranch — Ty and Nolan Feldner, proprietors — is down to nine.

For those of you who might have missed, our son and daughter-in-law — Ethan and Sharon, parents of the neophyte chicken ranchers — recently moved to their own five-acre country estate, complete with several outbuildings.

Since one of them was a chicken coop, Terry decided that the perfect Easter present for the grandsons would be live baby chicks — 10 to be exact — that they could raise in their chicken coop.

I was just glad that they were going to live somewhere other than in our yard or our basement — fortunately, there’s an ordinance that prohibits raising chickens in the city. If there weren’t, I would be contacting my aldermen immediately to have one enacted as soon as possible.

There were three black chicks, three yellow chicks and four multi-colored ones, including two that looked some kind of foreign to me, hence the names Parmesan and Cacciatore for those and the other names listed above for the rest.

Actually, those are the names I though they should have. Nobody else went along with my suggestion, but that’s never held me back in the past and it won’t now.

About a week after we left the brood in Ty’s tender care on Easter Sunday, I ran into Ty and his mother at the store.

I asked Ty how the baby chicks were doing. He got a very sad, long face and very solemnly told me that he had something to tell me.

To put him at ease, I asked him if one of the chicks had died, and he sadly informed me that, indeed, one of them had departed for that great chicken coop in the sky.

All right, he wasn’t quite that melodramatic about it — he just said that one of them had died, but only one.

Never one to let an opportunity pass, I then asked him how many chicks he started out with. “Ten.” “And how many chicks died?” “One.” “So how many chicks do you have left?” “Nine.” “So ten take away one equals?” “Nine.” “See, you’ve learned some math from this.”

His grandfather, who taught high school math for 30 years, would have been proud of me — and of Ty.

He couldn’t tell me, though, which one had died. Either he was too grief-stricken to remember which one it was, or he can’t really tell them apart — you know, those chicks all look the same.

He had told us earlier in the week that he had decided to give one of the chicks to his other grandmother. When we asked him which one he gave her, Ty said it wasn’t the stinky one, which we thought was very considerate of him.

He couldn’t say whether the one that died was the stinky one, or the one he gave his other grandmother. She was also with him at the store when I learned of the demise of the chick, but she couldn’t clear things up any further either.

We did stop out at the chicken ranch later in the week, just to see how the chicks were doing and find out which one was no longer among the living — or should I say, the pecking.

That was when we found out that it was one of the multi-colored ones that had passed on. I arbitrarily decided it was Cacciatore, since I like Chicken Parmesan better than Chicken Cacciatore anyway. That may seem harsh, but hey, life is harsh sometimes. It’s another lesson Ty needs to learn.

The rest of the chickens are much bigger than when we last saw them Easter morning. Judged on what we saw, it’s a pretty safe bet that Cacciatore didn’t starve to death.

We pretty well confirmed that we got them all future hens and not future roosters, so Ty and Nolan will probably be learning how to collect eggs in a few short months or so.

Then we’ll have to come up with a whole bunch of new names — Scrambled, Hard Boiled, Over Easy, Sunny Side Up, Omelet, Poached and so forth.