Another Poultry Story

When I was about 7 years old, my mother ordered for me a pair of Bantam chickens from Murray McMurray Hatcheries. She'd ordered baby chicks from them for years; a lot of people did. They were shipped by mail, and in the spring when you went into the post office, you could hear the peeping from the baby chickens. The boxes had little round airholes punched in the sides. But my chickens were not to be the little baby chicks that would grow into adult barnyard hens and roosters. My chickens were to be already grown adult purebred Bantams. Every day since my mother told me they were coming, I would run down to the post office, located on the corner then, which now is all apartments. Sometimes I would check several times a day; the waiting seemed like eternity. One day on a Friday afternoon, I ran down to get the mail and all that was there was a single yellow postcard, which I put on the kitchen counter, having lost all hope of the chickens coming before the weekend. The next day my mother picked up the postcard, and read that "Your birds are ready to be picked up at the Railroad Depot", upstreet in the Village. I guess they must have been too big for post office delivery. And because that office was closed on Saturday, I had to wait til the next Monday to get them. I felt embarrassed for not having read the postcard, but when we finally got the bantams the next day, I was so excited I forgot the agony of all the waiting. The rooster was all black with very red comb and wattles; we named him Dick. The hen was tan flecked with silvery white, smaller than Dick; she was Polly. I loved owning those bantams; I had them for a long time, and in a perfect world, I would still own bantams today.