I was terrified of chickens as child. Before you judge me, I can assure you I came by it honestly and through no fault of my own.
Knowledge evolves, some people not so much. Those who come after us will probably consider our knowledge primitive and a joke.
So it’s natural that over seventy years ago our understanding of the nervous system was limited.
And so it was that a dead chicken and I met and shared a moment. One that freaked me out and caused me to fear chickens until my teens. It didn’t help that I grew up hearing about some paranoid chicken that ran around screaming about the sky falling.
The fact my interaction with a chicken corpse terrified the hell out of me is no surprise.
Funny how the memories the most years ago seem clearer now. I must have been three or four years old and at my grandmother’s house. She had just returned from the butcher and placed the dead chicken on the kitchen table.
I entered the room when she walked out to get something and while I stood staring at the naked bird, it leapt up off the table.
I did a quick Linda Blair move and started screaming.
My grandmother came in and for some reason she had trouble believing the chicken jumped.
Despite my fears and attempts to convince her I’m pretty sure she believed me as much as a woman who finds lipstick on her husband’s collar.
So the chicken and I shared a moment. Not a good one, where I was left believing I had seen a dead chicken arise from the dead.
Soon after when my grandfather took me out to visit relatives who owned a farm, it wouldn’t end pretty. A barnyard full of chickens came running at me, I freaked and wouldn’t let my grandfather put me down the entire time we were there.
Yep, the dye was cast and chickens and I were at an impasse. I believed when they were dead, they ought to stay that way. At least in my presence. And apparently, they didn’t.
Of course now I understand that it wasn’t the chicken’s fault he had a zombie moment. It was the fact the nervous system can still act after death.
Today we understand these anatomical anomalies. But back then in olden days, not so much.
Wouldn’t it be amazing if fifty years from now we learned that eating ice cream with a chocolate chip cookie with a potato chip chaser creates a chemical reaction that causes weight loss? Or two brownies eaten together quickly can rev up your metabolism by double digits?
Or that jogging ages us by ten years or maybe that people who claim to be abducted by aliens, are actually the aliens?
So many things we were told as kids have been turned upside down by current knowledge and experimentation.
I learned this when my son was born. When I asked my pediatrician if I should feed him the same formula as my daughter, he said absolutely not it has too much fat content.
Well gee, Doc thanks for telling me now. So to my daughter it wasn’t my fault, don’t blame us moms for listening to the doctors.
As we still do today. And that’s scary.
We all wonder if that certain pill we took or that vaccine we were forced to take is actually a little stealth bullet waiting to shoot us somewhere down the line.
I guess despite the fact we all are a bit more skeptical of new drugs, new treatments and discoveries, we really have no choice in many cases.
When the data says go for it and our lives are at stake, we kinda have to.
I suppose I’m especially suspicious because of my dead chicken moment, but perhaps we all should be.
In many ways we are in a lose lose situation here.
Too many examples of drugs gone rogue and delivering unforeseen consequences have harmed and even killed people.
When I see an ad for a new treatment on TV and the list of side effects is longer than the ad for the pill, I find myself thinking, Damn, cancer, no liver, heart issues, and possible loss of my right arm. Never mind! My arthritis is sounding pretty good right now. Check please.
So perhaps that chicken did me a favor. If it made me suspicious of chickens rising from the dead, of pharmaceutical, companies touting new miracle drugs or a cure all for what ails you, so be it.
I’m grateful I’m a skeptic. Sure we need new medicines. Many have been amazing and done wonders to help keep people living longer and with more quality of life.
Yet, I still see that dead chicken on my grandmother’s table when I hear about a new miracle drug.
I’ll have to keep my belief in miracles to parting the red sea and a newborn baby.
In the meantime, I can’t worry about what they may find out twenty years from now when zombie poultry may start roaming the earth.
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