THE ROOSTER MAN

I swear to you the next few sentences are true. 

I have been known to embellish a situation from time to time, although I never outright lie.  But it was amazing to me the things I’ve seen since yesterday and was not able to document it.

Actually it started Thursday of last week.  My beloved came walking into the house, shaking his head and laughing.

“You won’t believe what I just saw….” he said after pecking a quick one on my cheek.

“What’s that, dear?” I answered absent mindedly as I was interested in starting the paragraph for a column.

“A rooster!”

We live in the country so I wasn’t understanding the awe in his voice.  I looked up at him.  He was waiting for a reaction.

“A rooster?”

“Yeah, a rooster.  On a stick.”

“A stick?”  Now he had my attention. 

“Yeah.  Being held by a guy with a long scraggly beard.”

“A stick being held by a guy. With a long scraggly beard?”

“Yeah!”  He was besides himself now with excitement and couldn’t seem to believe the words himself as he spat them out. 

“A stick being held by a guy with a long scraggly beard, he was sitting right on it, and the guy was riding a bicycle.”  He was nearly jumping up and down with incredulous seriousness.

I didn’t believe him.

Come Saturday afternoon and we had many errands to run, one of them being the sad event of a funeral service.  We’ve had to go to several the last few days, and the sensation of here-we-go-again was sadly familiar.   The weekend before we had buried a much loved firefighter; he was only 62 years old and way to close to our own sense of immortality.  Another was the news of a friend who had died at 48 years old.  Things had ended badly between us 10 years earlier, and although we kept in touch here and there, it was never the same.  We never got to apologize to each other.

I had put away my camera, as I had covered two assignments for the paper earlier in the morning and left it on my desk, a faithful companion that I thought I would give a rest after using it all week.

It was as we were turning the bend of the road to town that I saw the figure which had driven my beloved nearly mad with excitement. 

A tall, scraggly beard man riding a bicycle.  On his shoulder was a long stick, slung over like a child who was running away from home.  I half expected to see hanging from it a ball of clothes, rolled up and tied like a make believe hobo of the road.

Instead, there sat a rooster, not tied or constrained, sitting on the end of it.

And me without a camera.

I saw other things that day as well, but those are better left to another column.

I will never put that darn thing away again.

======================== No column has ever tickled me more than the one I wrote about the man and his rooster I saw walking down the road (and on a bicycle).  

It has become one of the most talked about columns in this little upstate village where I live, and is the source of endless chatter amongst the residents.

People began coming up to me laughing and saying “I saw him!  The man!  And his CHICKEN!!!”

Actually, its a rooster.

Finally, someone took a picture of him and sent it to me.

I still like to know how he keeps that thing on the stick.

Wayne County.  My home.

Thanks to Lloyd Odle and his keen eyes