Trepid-what?

When you don't know if it is dark enough, that generally is the time that it needs to get darker. Darker like the way that the drumstick is different from the breast, but you know how that drumstick has the one added disadvantage of having that little cap of cartilage on the end. I know some folk (and I at one time had a friend in particular – more on him later) who purely love eating their way through a drumstick, feeling the veins and the tendons in their teeth, and then popping that little cap of cartilage off the end of the bone. Sometimes they chew on it like it were just another piece of meat, or even like some kind of a pacifier. Sometimes (if they are like the friend I am going to tell you about later) they find themselves unable to stomach the thought of a cartilage cap in their mouth, so they whole fresh load of chewed up chicken comes squirting out, hot and smelling, squirting right out of the stomach.

My wife told me just the other day that when a man vomits, he turns his stomach right inside out, like a bag that you put your hand into, grab a fistful of bag-meat, and then pull for all you are worth. The inside of the stomach suddenly becomes the outside, and all hell breaks loose. So the few who have that reaction to the little cap of cartilage on the end of a chicken leg, that's what they go through. It just doesn't sound too pretty.

I called down to Mr. Packy (and this time I was serious), and I asked him to please bring me some drumsticks along with some breasts. Now, when you see the breasts, you see the light. But when you see those legs, you see the dark. If you hold the two up to one another, maybe, just maybe you will see what I am talking about. As it is, I just see the two and I get hungry.

And Mr. Packy returned with my chicken and I heard the gunshot outside my window. I had to go and look, but I was, of course, afraid of what I might see. I slowly got out of my easy chair and sauntered to the window. I looked out at the live oaks all hanging with Spanish moss, hanging like some old man got his beard caught up in the branches and never did figure out how to get it down. I took a liking to that Spanish moss when I was just a little kid, as I thought it had some kind of magical powers, and I wanted nothing more than to be a wizard or a magician. I thought for a while that every little kid wanted to be a magician or a wizard but when Dilly Burr told me in the third grade that he wanted to drive the street sweeper when he grew up, I learned differently. So much for dreams. So much for the Spanish moss.

But I looked at it, anyway, and it sure looked nice, hanging like a beard. And I could see, I figured, where the gunshot had come from, but I didn't see anyone dying or anything. All I saw was that Spanish moss and a dark looking man in coveralls running toward the center of town.

And it was just then that I realized that the piece of dark meat I had pulled off the plate wasn't nearly as dark as it could be. So it is with chicken, and so it is, period.