Chick Cliches

Let us compare & contrast two iconic chickens: Chicken Little & The Little Red Hen. "Why 'Red,' anyway?" I hear you muse. Perhaps, because she got her start in a Russian folktale. She's the chick who keeps exhorting her deadbeat comrades to lend a hand with the sowing of some grain product (possibly rye in the original version), then with harvesting it, milling it, and baking it into bread. "Nyet," they tell her, at each juncture. Not one Therblig are they prepared to expend. Yet they expect to benefit from the Red Hen's labor and nosh her bread. "Nyet," she answers them back, and feeds her children, instead. I've always felt that the BFD quotient of this story was pretty high; but the Realpolitik motto of The Little Red Hen ("If you want a thing done right, do it yourself.") has made it into the Codex of Sadder-But-Wiser-Truisms.

Chicken Little (who may have started out as a hare in African folklore, several millenia ago) is the one who extrapolates, from one acorn falling on her head, a Doomsday scenario, to wit: "The sky is falling! The King must be informed!" She demagogues a flock of concerned poultry to accompany her on a mission to the king; but they are all schmized by Foxy Loxy into taking a detour to his den, where he has them for lunch, as it were. Nevertheless, her undelivered message ("The sky is falling!") has become synonymous with Reaching-a-Dire-Conclusion-Before-All-the-Data-Are-In.

So, there was I, last Saturday morning around 9 o'clock, when we usually set off for Lili's walk through the acorn-dropping woods, with a light but steady snow a-falling, knowing from 13 years of Michigan winters, that "You'd best keep a path from the garage to the street passable, or the (eventual) municipal snow-plowing of the streets will avail you nought." My heavy hints to this effect were received by my stronger half (who can actually get our rickety old snow blower to start) as the ravings of Chicken Little. So I got all Little Red Hen about it, and set to with my trusty (ergonomic) snow shovel, commencing what turned out to be a 2-day battle with Mother Nature, to be able to get to BWI airport on Sunday evening to collect our Second City daughter. Mind you, 30 minutes into my labors, Chris was out there, coaxing the reluctant snow blower into life; and he did not rest until sunset, when I Chicken Littled him again, this time saying, "A cleared driveway will avail us nought, if you get a heart attack in the process." (This warning has a certain, wry resonance with us, since, back in Detroit, he was once the TV pundit cardiologist, who advised that, "people over 40 should not shovel snow" lest they get a...you know.)

Eerily, we were the only two folks in the cul-de-sac out there toiling on the Saturday. Shades of Aesop's Grasshopper & Ant fable. Gotta tell ya, it was a little bit humiliating, to think of our neighbors, tucked up snugly (maybe even smugly) in their warm houses, watching the two of us Chicken Littles, inflicting pain & suffering on ourselves, in our Sisyphean task. Did they know something we didn't?

On Sunday morning our next-door-neighbor (also Chris) who has a fancy, ride-on snow plow, discovered that he could not get it out of his garage, to begin to tackle the 2 feet of snowfall. He confessed that his wife was "beside herself with him," since they had to get to Dulles that night, to collect their daughter, who was weather-delayed in Amsterdam. It was one of those moral dilemmas. Should we (the Ants) forsake our own driveway project, to help our neighbor (the Grasshopper) begin his? Here is where one learns that social guilt is an uncomfortable mix of intrusion (of others' poor planning into one's own agenda) and humiliation (that one is Not a Good-enough Neighbor, even during the Christmas season). I was half-heartedly offering him the use of my trusty Jeep to get to their airport, when, miraculously, a neighbor from up the road arrived with an industrial-strength snow clearing device, and had him (and all the other driveways in the cul-de-sac, except ours) done within an hour.

No more social guilt, then. Just the humiliation of realizing that, on our road at least, Grasshoppers rule and Ants drool. (Not to mention, ache.) Lili, meanwhile, has not had a walk in the woods since the blizzard began, but gets her aerobic exercise by gazelle-leaping through the snow, to do the needful in her usual spot out front.