When Chickens Fly
By: susan peterson stamis
Tags: chicago, chicken, foreign service, steak, stockyard
Category: Uncategorized
In this 1962 picture, my father and his mother are basting and barbecuing meat stuffs, most likely affordable chicken, for the hungry kin gathered under the shade trees in the back yard. I imagine Dad Greek-chatting with Yiayia about our most recent cross-country road trip, and maybe this one was from Washington DC to Los Angeles or the other way around.
During his stint in the US, Dad liked to show us the sights of America, and one of these journeys took us through the Petrified Forest, where we stopped for a while to gawk at the tree shaped rocks lying on the scorched ground, looking for all the world like gigantic sticks of charcoal.
My father stuck to Route 66 from Santa Monica to its eastern terminus of Chicago. It was there that Dad decided to treat his family of three females, my mother, my teenaged sister and pre-teen me, to a drive-by of the Union Stockyards. I was mildly curious until we made our approach into the dreary neighborhood and were stupefied by a most horrendous stench.
In an ill-considered stab at educating me, Dad, who loved a blood-rare steak smothered in ketchup, described what was going on behind the walls of the stockyard while I curled up in my designated corner of the back seat, holding my nose and crying my heart out.
My sister and I grew up mostly pet-less because my fastidious mom didn’t like to deal with fur and poop; but in Guatemala, my nine-year-old self was presented with a pet chicken. She strutted, clucked and pecked her days away on the patio where she lived behind the kitchen, shedding feathers and polka-dotting the concrete with chicken kaka. Most mornings I was treated to a fresh egg, but in a matter of a weeks, the chicken disappeared…no more eggs, no more feathers, no more kaka.
My little self knew that chickens couldn’t fly, but in spite of my relentless inquisition of my parents and the help, no one could explain to me in English or Spanish how my chicken had escaped the enclosed patio. For a while my child’s heart preferred to believe that the chicken had simply run away from home. I imagined her strutting her way through the kitchen, the dining room, the living room and the entry, making a final fluttering dash through the front door to freedom; but over time I came to suspect that my sweet pet had run afoul of a machete and was laid to rest in our skillet.
About Me
My father was a Consular Officer in the United States Foreign Service. He was first stationed in post World War II Berlin, where I was born in 1950. Subsequently, we lived in the Philippines; Jamaica; Guatemala; Washington, DC; Greece; Ceylon and Mexico; visiting many places in between. I was reared by my parents and nurtured by the various amahs, nannies, and housemaids who, every two years or so, entered and exited my little life.
I was educated in American Schools in “foreign lands,” but the most fascinating classrooms were the exotic locales where we lived, and the most inspiring teachers were the colorful people of those exotic and ancient cultures.
The bi-annual “home leaves” which my family spent at my grandparents’ homes in Los Angeles, California provided a sense of constancy to our nomadic lifestyle. My many aunts, uncles and cousins lived there and I eagerly looked forward to those vacations. We were 1st and 2nd generation Greek Americans (all 4 of my grandparents had immigrated at the turn of the century), and thus had foreignness stamped onto us even though we were Americans.
Two of my father’s siblings were also in the diplomatic service, and we world-traveling cousins were a source of endless curiosity to our domestic counterparts when we came home speaking English with unusual accents, reducing the statesiders to hysterics.With his various cameras, Kodachrome, Ektachrome, 16 millimeter, Super 8 and Polaroid, my father rarely lost an opportunity to document the events unfolding around us. After years of waiting patiently in boxes under the stairs, these photographic records are now fulfilling their purpose as mnemonic retrievals of my little life.
Mnemonic Retrievals 