On Chickens

Daniel's first job was at the Outdoor Learning Center, a sort of children's museum behind the Katy High School. Ostensibly it was designed to teach students about the early settler's of east Texas and what life was like in the early 19th century. In reality it was a form of all-encompassing punishment. If your class was good that year, you took a field trip to the Imax in downtown Houston and watched a two hour movie about volcanoes. If your class was bad, you had to listen to an eighty-year old woman jaw on about bee-keeping and gourd-painting. For two hours.
Daniel's primary duty was to collect eggs in the hen house. To this day I have no idea how he handled it - hanging out in a rancid chicken coop all afternoon and putting his hand in the bathing suit area of hundreds of squawking, disgusting chickens to collect their admittedly tasty menstruations. This is a person who used to run out of the room terrified whenever the Noid came on television. But somehow Daniel and his fine-feathered charges eventually formed a bond that manifested itself in an unexpected way.
"Mom - I will no longer eat chickens, please."
My mother initially stood her ground. "This is not a restaurant. I am not a chef. This kitchen is a dictatorship, and I'm Pol Pot, and you are a boy who is eating his chicken ala king."
"But I can't eat chickens because they are my friends. I collect their eggs and they love me."
Even Pol Pot couldn't withstand that. So for about a year and a half Daniel was officially exempt from all poultry consumption.
Then on Christmas Eve we decided to revive an old family tradition. When my parents were first married they were gloriously poor. The swankiest Christmas Dinner fare possible was Long John Silver's. For our family, eating deep fried fish and chips from the dirtiest fast food joint in West Houston was akin to a Passover Seder. "We eat these hushpuppies to remind us that, many times, dog meat was right around the corner."
The only snafu: Fish ranks number three on the list of foods that will make Daniel die, right after all vegetables and all fruits. This was a time of grave decision making. On the one hand, Daniel had a moral obligation to not eat any poultry. On the other hand, fish swim in their own toilet water and will make Daniel keel over dead within the first bite. Furthermore, there were no chickens in sight, no hens or roosters in our kitchen to witness Daniel breaking his solemn dietary code and report back to his beloved charges at the Outdoor Learning Center. How would they ever find out that Daniel ate chicken, just this once, under extreme Yuletide duress? They wouldn't. Daniel took three pieces of chicken and put them on his plate.
My mother whipped out a camera. "Oh, really?" she asked.
You know those scenes on the news, where a celebrity has been caught peeing on a fourteen year old girl or drinking half a slurpee they found on a bus station bench? And the paparazzi are swarming like locusts around the guilty party, who is vainly attempting to conceal his identity by burying his face in his hands? That's what Daniel looked like, bits of white meat and breading spewing forth from his mouth, panicked, as he waved his hand in front of the camera lens and begged my mother to not tell his chickens about the awful thing he was doing.