Bubba: The Chicken or the Egg

By Bobby Neal Winters

It had been a while since I’d spoken with my old friend Bubba from back home.  You might remember him because he lives just on the other side of Wapanucka, down in that neck of the woods.  

I dialed his number and was reminded immediately why I hadn’t called him. When he answered the phone, it wasn’t with “Hello” or any standard answer. It was with a burst of conversation that might’ve been coming from a fire hose.

I have a stutter that I’ve come to cope with by speaking slowly with many long pauses.  It keeps me from stuttering, but the price for this is in talking with some people--the name Bubba comes to mind--I don’t get to speak much at all.

Anyway, after he picked up the phone, some interval of time was spent with him clearing the buffers, bringing me up-to-date with the goings-on at the local churches, the fortunes of the local ball teams, and the fates of mutual acquaintances.  Finally, he made a statement followed by a pause that was long enough for me to become a more active part of the conversation.

“I have an idea,” he said, “that will change the whole country for the better.”

And there he paused.  Instead of using that interval to say what I’d called him to say, I stupidly took the bait.

“Oh, what’s that?”

He leapt.

“Well, you know we’ve got three big problems in the country right now. One, marijuana is becoming legal in more and more places; two, we’ve got a bunch of sorry people sitting on their couches, watching the tube and smoking weed; three, the price of eggs is going through the roof.”

“Well, uh...” I tried to break in not not necessarily seeing eye to eye with him on these issues, but during the time it had taken me to speak my lone sentence, he’d miraculously replenished his body’s oxygen supply.  He tore through my attempt to speak like a reciprocating saw through scrap wood.

“The price of eggs is up because the bird flu got into a bunch of the factory chicken farms.  Those farms are crowded.  If one chicken is infected, they are all infected.  They are just nasty, nasty places. You wouldn’t treat the dog the way they treat those chickens.”

There, he paused a bit.  I could have broken in, but my mind got confused by not wanting to treat a dog the way you treat a chicken.  While I was still stuck there, he gathered his resources and moved on.

“The answer to that,” he said, “is to have smaller chicken farms like back in the day.  Didn’t your family raise chickens when you were growing up?”

Under the mistaken inference that he wanted a response, I began, “Well, yes, we raised, bant...”

“Everybody’s family around here did,” he cut me off. “There’s not all that much to it. It’s not rocket science.  You just need a little spot of land, some fencing, and a chicken house.  That’s about it.

“Well, that’s about what you need to grow marijuana as well. What I think they ought to do is say, fine, you can sit around watching the tube all day and smoke dope, but you are also going to have to raise chickens.  We will let you sell some weed to pay for necessities, but you are going to have to sell eggs too.

“This will at least get them off their backsides [Bubba never said the word backsides in his life, but the gentle reader can supply the appropriate noun] and breathing some outside air.  They’ll see how the sun and rain makes plants grow, and in taking care of the chickens, they might learn to care for somebody besides themselves.”

It was then that he paused with the expectation that I would reply.  How ironic that at that very moment I was struck speechless.  

“What do you think?” he asked into the silence.

I replied truthfully, “I don’t know what to say.”

“It’s brilliant, ain’t it?” from the tone, it wasn’t a question.

“It’s something all right.”

“You bet, it’s something. It might just save the country.  Not so many sorry, pale people walking around, better eggs, not treating chickens like dogs any more.  I should run for president.”

With that, I shuddered, and took the pause to say, “Goodbye, Bubba.”

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )