Cock-a-doodle-doo

I read somewhere, in what was supposed to be an excerpt from a spy manual, that the real way to make people crazy, like lose-your-cool-and-spill-all-the-secrets, don't-know-who-to-trust crazy is to sneak into their bedrooms and make very, very minor changes, moving things a few inches one way or another, and then to slowly increase the changes until the target loses all faith in his memory and ability to understand the world and everyone he complains to says he's crazy and then he believes it and there you go.

That might be a good way to take down a spy, but if you want to take down a mother of four young children, set up a coop of meat chickens behind the house and let them get old enough for the roosters start to crow. They don't crow like Buster.

Buster came to us a full-grown rooster, so I don't know what his early vocal experiments were like, but now he has the classic, almost musical except that it's really, really annoying, rooster crow. It's not cookadoodledo, but it's a close Raaa-raa-raa-raaaaaaaaaaa. Actually, the English language does not have characters for the sound, but if you scrunch up your nose and upper lip like you want to make a pig grunting noise, then try to make your mouth tall and narrow like a fish, tip your head back and then try to make the Raaa-raa-raa-raaaaaaaa noise, you'll just about have it. It's loud and awful at three o'clock in the morning, but it's unmistakably a rooster crowing.

The meat birds, on the other hand, sound just like an unhappy child. Their crows sound something like waaa-waaaaaa and are made with one's face in the unhappy-child-pouting position. There are 36 birds out there and about half of them are roosters and some are bigger than others and between them, they have the first two notes of child-distress covered for children ages 8 to 18 months. Possibly, they can do older and younger children, too, but Cliffy is eight and Oliver is eighteen months and, along with five-year-old Jackson and three-year-old Harley, they all sound like they're having big troubles about every five minutes, sunup to sundown.

These first two notes of crying, as any parent knows, are the ones that tune one's ear to listen for whether the problem is hunger, frustration, disappointment, injustice, physical pain, actual injury, existentialist angst or mortal peril. The silence following those notes can be a child who is very, very upset taking a big breath for better screaming, the airway closing, or the child getting distracted and moving on. I think if you added up all the seconds I've spent, ear strained, listening to the post waaa-waaaaaa silence, you'd have the tensest ten hours of my life.

And now, since last weekend, the chickens are doing it to me, too. Oliver took a three-hour nap today, but every few minutes, I was sure he was up and sad. You'd think I would get used to it after a while and learn the difference between chickens and children, but they sound exactly the same and the one time I don't react would be the one time a kid really needed me.

We'll be rolling out the chopping block before too long, and I'd like to think I'm a mentally strong person, so I think I can make it. As long as no one moves the stuff on my dresser or rearranges the spices, I think I'll be okay. Later, when the coop is silent, I can relax with a hot bowl of chicken soup.