TUCKED DEEP IN THE laundry room in the basement of our house in Western Pennsylvania sits a careworn hatchet, its blade dulled by decades of disuse. This largely abandoned tool contains a history that is, I believe, known only to me. During the Coolidge and Hoover administrations (and possibly the early tenure of F. Roosevelt as well), it was deployed to decapitate chickens.
This sounds jarringly visceral today, but in fact it was a relatively normal practice on the suburban Cleveland block where my father spent his boyhood in the 1920s.
The family chicken coops were kept in an unattached garage, and when there came a need for a dinner most fowl, instead of procuring it in a shrink-wrapped Styrofoam sarcophagus at a supermarket as we do today, my grandfather made the trek from house to coop with his hatchet. By and by, he returned with the freshly dispatched bird for dinner.
When chicken emerged from oven and made it to the table, my grandfather — being a man of the house in the early 20th century — was served first. As my father always told it, given the choice of breast or drumstick, thigh or wing, my grandfather always went straight for the pile of giblets and selected the neck. I am aware of this only secondhand; though I carry his name, I never knew him.
My grandfather’s preference puzzled my father for many years afterward. Here was the toughest part of the chicken, gray and wiry, not all that tasty, with very little meat attached. Yet each night that a chicken was roasted, the neck was what my grandfather chose. The boy who became my father didn’t mind. “More of the good parts for me,” he said to himself and, later, to me.
Then he grew up and had children.
Somewhere along the line he realized that his father probably didn’t actually want the neck of the chicken but was, in fact, saving said good parts for his wife and young son. Not that he’d ever have said so. I’m told that my grandfather, a railroad clerk, was a quiet, generous, somewhat formal man who always kept things exceedingly low key. He died at age 60 on the first day of winter in 1954 — three days after his own mother’s death — without ever revealing his chicken-neck motivations to his only offspring. They never had the kind of conversations about everyday emotions that are as — what? — granular as the ones I have every day with my sons.
When I was growing up, my mother often made Shake ‘N Bake chicken legs and thighs in the oven. My father would rummage through the serving plate for the one with the knobbiest joints. Always served first by my mother (gender bias dies hard), he’d spend dinner crunching the cartilage and ignoring my contorted facial protests at the horrible noise. “I like the gristle,” he’d say to me as I, oblivious, grabbed the meatiest thigh.
When my boys were smaller, we often had homemade chicken wings for dinner. My two sons — who, for better or worse, tended to dive right in and liberate the food from its serving dishes before my wife and I could get at it, would each go straight for the plumpest miniature “drumette” and, fleetingly, squabble over it. I would wait until the dust settled, then take one of the much smaller ones that sat at the margins.
I get it now.
"My grandfather’s preference puzzled my father for many years afterward. Here was the toughest part of the chicken, gray and wiry, not all that tasty, with very little meat attached. Yet each night that a chicken was roasted, the neck was what my grandfather chose. The boy who became my father didn’t mind. “More of the good parts for me,” he said to himself and, later, to me.
Then he grew up and had children."
That section made me teary-eyed. Beautiful story.