“You often meet your fate on the road you take to avoid it.” – French proverb
In my hometown, there is a hatchery. They produce little baby chicks and slaughter bigger ones. When I was growing up, it was called Breeden’s Poultry and Hatchery, named after the family that owned it.
That always made me laugh–they were breedin’ chickens all right, those Breedens. For a time, I considered the remarkable possibility that we were all destined to have jobs that were either phonetically or intuitively related to our names. I had briefly contemplated being a doctor, but since my last name is pronounced “die,” I thought those Code Blues at Grace Hospital might be rather disconcerting for all involved. Perhaps “Paging Dr. Digh" might not convey quite the right message for a healer. This name/occupation fascination is second only to the curious phenomenon of teaching what we need to learn—communications professionals who are unable to communicate effectively, for example.
A vegetarian for the past 30 years, the very idea of a hatchery and slaughterhouse was one I tried to avoid pondering as I drove past; I was clearly in the minority—it was a thriving business that bought a big house with a tennis court for the Breeden twins, the only kids in our high school with matching convertibles. Turns out that poor, defenseless, cute little chicks are big business in this country. Fast forward thirty years and my older lifelong-vegetarian-daughter is toting her Algebra and Latin books to school in a PETA “I am not a nugget” backpack. What is that saying about an apple not falling far from the tree?
One afternoon when I was in high school, I took the bypass home, the one near the School for the Deaf. As I drove by the movie theatre and where Buck’s Pizza is now, I could see tiny pom-poms falling from the truck ahead of me, only a few at first, and then dozens, and then hundreds of them, 
floating through the air toward my car and then falling faster toward my windshield. “How odd! I wonder if that truck is from Michael’s Craft Store and they forgot to close their back door?” I thought to myself.
Suddenly, in one sickening, slow-motion instant as I turned the windshield wipers on, then quickly off, I had realized what the pom-poms were. They were all yellow. And they weren’t pom-poms, but chicks—small, yellow pom-poms of chicks falling like rain from a Breeden’s truck, pelting my car by the hundreds. In that instant, I had gone from ignorance to naivete to denial to avoidance to recognition to panic and sick.
I’ve come to realize in the course of my life that I rather like phase #4 and can spend inordinate amounts of time there—getting the letter from the Department of Revenue, but not opening it, for example—but that awful afternoon, there was no avoiding it; the chicks were pelting my car, hitting the windshield, papering the pavement all around me. Where could I turn? What could I do? How could I make this all go away?
In graduate school, I had a small apartment near campus one year. In the middle of the night, I heard a swooshing sound above me, like a bird was flying around the room. First, it’s important to know that I Don’t Do Birds. They are among my highest forms of anxiety; my dressing up like Tippi Hedren from “The Birds” for Halloween one year merely a vague attempt to face that fear. My immediate response to the invasion? I pulled the covers over my head.
That Brilliant Strategy was short-lived as I ran out of oxygen, realizing that avoidance wouldn’t work. To heighten the horror, as I came out of the covers and turned on the light, I realized that the bird wasn’t a bird after all—it was a gigantic bat, swooping down at me, wildly flying around the room, getting closer and closer to me. Of course, I did the only thing I could—I ran from the room, locking myself in the bathroom.
I’m not sure I had fully thought through the implications of living the rest of my life in a bathroom.
I could hear the giant bat hitting against things in the next room, blindly groping for me, waiting to suck the blood out of me after getting caught in my hair—isn’t that what giant bats do? It finally hit me that living in the bathroom wasn’t a viable option, not if I wanted to get to my Milton class the next morning, so I emerged, lunging for the hall phone, dialing my mother’s number with shaking hands. It was 4:15 a.m. and I was approximately 312 miles away from her, so I’m unsure of the efficacy of this strategy, but after some amazingly cogent woken-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night discussion, she suggested I call the Fire Department. When I did, the fireman told me without an iota of empathy: “We don’t do bats.” “Neither do I!” I cried before hanging up the phone.
In truth, I just wanted to walk away from that apartment and never go back.
Friends came over to catch the bat, but couldn’t. He tormented me for three days, coming out at night to stalk me. I opened my closet one evening to see his enormous shadow silhouetted on the closet door; as he lost energy, his swooping got lower and lower. Finally, as he swooped around chest level, I found myself using an ironing board like a shield, fending him off. “Call the SPCA,” someone suggested. “Where were you three days ago?” I thought.
A friend finally came and trapped Bat Man in the bathroom, my former refuge. I sat outside the bathroom all night, listening as he flung himself against the walls; I called the SPCA in the morning. The bat they extracted from the bathroom was a pretend bat, tiny, no bigger than three inches wide, with its wings extended. (There’s a lesson in there somewhere about the size of our fear and its proportion to our avoidance of it, isn’t there?)
No, the chicken truck called for a different strategy—avoidance simply wasn’t possible—and it was happening in broad daylight. As I followed that truck, I realized that if I stopped, I would at some point have to start again, crushing those tiny chick puffballs into Fleming Bypass after watching them become individualized as I sat still. If I kept going, I would witness and participate in the murder of thousands of small chicks. If I slowed down, I could see their little eyes just before they hit; if I sped up, they hit my car harder, more forcefully, like feathered hail.
As a metaphor, it’s fantastic, a Gabriel Garcia Marquez moment, though I would much prefer the augur of a swarm of yellow butterflies to my phalanx of chicks—as a reality rather than lyrical metaphor, it’s an ironic horror story—Vegetarian Pelted to Death by Chicks Bound for Slaughter.
I wonder what we should do when something is coming toward us like that—unavoidable, with no good solution, no clear way out, no way to close our eyes, get under the covers, lock ourselves in the bathroom, no way to go in reverse.
Years ago, a friend told a similar, though perhaps not so graphically deadly story, of driving and suddenly being in a snowstorm of white, though it was a summer night. His headlights illuminated a vast storm of white, rushing toward the car. Shocked, he slowed down, a speed change that allowed the mad rush of white to become a beautiful ballet of white butterflies surrounding his car. He sped up again; they became a furious rush of white dying against the windshield. He slowed; they became a beautiful dance in which he was participating, gracefully allowing them to co-exist with him.
Avoidance, speed, dread, fear, change.
What tiny yellow pom-poms are flying toward me now?
~*~ 37 Days: Do it Now Challenge ~*~
Name your pom-poms. Determine the speed that will reveal their beauty, not destroy them. Move into the disturbance. Keep driving.
In my hometown, there is a hatchery. They produce little baby chicks and slaughter bigger ones. When I was growing up, it was called Breeden’s Poultry and Hatchery, named after the family that owned it. 
A vegetarian for the past 30 years, the very idea of a hatchery and slaughterhouse was one I tried to avoid pondering as I drove past; I was clearly in the minority—it was a thriving business that bought a big house with a tennis court for the Breeden twins, the only kids in our high school with matching convertibles. Turns out that poor, defenseless, cute little chicks are big business in this country. Fast forward thirty years and my older lifelong-vegetarian-daughter is toting her Algebra and Latin books to school in a PETA “I am not a nugget” backpack. What is that saying about an apple not falling far from the tree?
floating through the air toward my car and then falling faster toward my windshield. “How odd! I wonder if that truck is from Michael’s Craft Store and they forgot to close their back door?” I thought to myself. 
That Brilliant Strategy was short-lived as I ran out of oxygen, realizing that avoidance wouldn’t work. To heighten the horror, as I came out of the covers and turned on the light, I realized that the bird wasn’t a bird after all—it was a gigantic bat, swooping down at me, wildly flying around the room, getting closer and closer to me. Of course, I did the only thing I could—I ran from the room, locking myself in the bathroom. 
Years ago, a friend told a similar, though perhaps not so graphically deadly story, of driving and suddenly being in a snowstorm of white, though it was a summer night. His headlights illuminated a vast storm of white, rushing toward the car. Shocked, he slowed down, a speed change that allowed the mad rush of white to become a beautiful ballet of white butterflies surrounding his car. He sped up again; they became a furious rush of white dying against the windshield. He slowed; they became a beautiful dance in which he was participating, gracefully allowing them to co-exist with him. 
Name your pom-poms. Determine the speed that will reveal their beauty, not destroy them. Move into the disturbance. Keep driving.
