BRENNA'S SOMETHING

"Dad!" she yelled, and my reading dropped to the floor, unmarked, word-images forgotten in a new moment where there were now three of us; full of answers and questions and cackles, awash in the thrill of "How can this be happening? Here? Now? A chicken in the living room?"

"This chicken will change your life!" Brenna promised, "It will change your life!"

Now, I'm a proud, unconventional Dad, prone to wild displays of carefree improvisation, irreverent tomfoolery and mind-expanding silliness. So, my daughters feel the freedom to act from the soul, deal with the consequences later and win by ignoring the conformity game rules.

We had a chicken in the house!

Between excitement-stoked breaths and wide-eyed gulps, my sweet heart-song girl pieced together the fowl backstory in the headlong cliffhanger style that only children and mighty talespinners use: start as close to the end of the story as possible, and begin with a bang.

"She almost got hit by a truck, but Mom and me saved her!"

My eyes pushed my brows to the sky. "What? How? Where did this happen?"

Knowing how to be a good audience is part of being loved by a storyteller.

My three year-old, Ayla, ran into the room and sat on the floor directly under the bird. Brenna's eyes let me know that a two-second replay in her mind would lay out all the bits she wanted to weave together.

For a regrettable blink I saw Ayla; chicken; droppings... but held my unvoiced concern with pride.

"She was on the freeway!" Brenna shouted. "Nobody around -- nowhere! She coulda' got killed!"

I love this. Danger, abandonment, jeopardy, clear and direct; meant to set the hook in a meager three sentences.

"If we didn't stop, she'd be dead!"

My wife walked into the room and gave me the face: Standard Parental Conspiratorial Grimace #7 -- "Your daughter is in Animal Rescue Mode. Prepare for pleading."

I fell right into "awe-struck Pappy” attitude, giving Brenna another moment to collect her wits.

I said to my wife, "Laura? There's a chicken in our house!"

She quickly switched to "Mild Concern" tinged with a dash of "Wild-girl Conspiracy" that was not lost on either kid.

Brenna is six. A baby, a girl and an old soul whose young eyes can pass over the cat on the drain board and the dog on the bed; but a chicken should never cross a busy road -- even if only to get to the other side.

"Dad, this chicken will change your life!"

Her copper colored eyes, bright and clear, searched my face for a hint, a clue, before assembling the question we both knew was pecking around our feet.

I was already figuring: packing crate, wire mesh room addition on the deck with water, feed, a light bulb for heat, droppings to clean up…

"Wait a second!" I shouted, "Wait a second. You're holding a chicken, in our house, at 7:30 p.m., and you still haven't told me the most important piece of information I need to know before we can go any further!"

The girls bought it, and I drank in their wiped-blank innocent faces for a split second as my performance held the room.

"Whaaaaat..." I stretched out, "is her name?"

The spell, broken and enjoyed by all gave way to smiling puzzlement.

Ayla put her hands up to support the calming feather pet and said, so definitively, that I was sure there must have been a prior agreement struck in the car.

"Zazu." she announced, "Zazu Hicken."

I didn't know if she meant "Zazu Chicken" or "Zazu Higgins," but what was the difference?

Zazu Chicken was now Zazu Higgins. Our family has more than enough room, and love, and corn for any creature that was "going to change someone's life."

And change it did.

You see, Brenna's teacher had explained to me weeks earlier that there was only one area in which our daughter did not excel.

"She's so spontaneous and uninhibited that some of the children don't know how to play with her. So, Brenna gets excluded and compensates by trying too hard for their friendship."

I heard my own first grade teacher's voice saying "trying too hard for friendship."

I just never had that certain something that made me one of the in-group, so I stayed in my room and read, and imagined, and cried.

My daughter now needed that certain something, too.

Well, Brenna became a chicken expert to her classmates, astounding all with the depth of her knowledge and understanding of Zazu and her many relatives.

When the cool kids in her class (i.e., bigger, loudmouth boys) cracked wise about how a pet chicken was a dumb cluck, Brenna set them straight -- their dropped jaws, mouth breathing and bewildered imaginations hinting at a new balance of power in the room -- as she traced Zazu's ancestry back to Pteradon, the flying dinosaur of the Jurassic period.

Woof!

So now, if they're lucky, her new friends can come and play at Brenna's house where she's allowed to have a dinosaur on the deck. Droppings and all.

After all, what's a little birdshit among friends?

- end -

Martin Higgins