Yesterday, whilst I was tootling around doing errands with the kids, I fell, as many are wont to do, to trying to perfect various farm animal sounds. One has to while away the minutes somehow: can you name a better way than to perfect farm animal sounds?
Just late last week we’d gone to Little Farm — just what it sounds like: a wee, working farm, with a little bit of everything you’d want in such a place — in the nearby regional park with a school chum of the girl child’s.  So the barnyard’s aural landscape was still crisp in my mind. I had the chicken down pretty well, but the turkey escaped me.  I went back and forth between them, but was continually tempted to stick with the chicken sound, since that one was the one that made me feel successful. Like, Man Do I Have a Cool Parent successful.
Then the girl child casually pawned off this gem: “Baba, if you practice chicken, you’re going to get nowhere with the turkey.â€
Well shet my mouth.  Now, whenever I find myself avoiding the shin-skinning scramble up the rough scree of challenge for the comfortable, back-massaging Barcalounger of guaranteed, no-effort success, well. I’ll just try to remember the deathless words of my five-year-old: if you practice chicken, you’re going to get nowhere with the turkey.
well cock my doodle! Is she a Zen priest?
If ever there were a Zen priest in the form of a precocious little blond Virgo kid, then yes, she is. Reincarnated. Come to haunt my ass. It’s much appreciated.
Laughing out loud at your last few sentences….I think passable turkey is impossible. Seems fitting somehow, that a bird bestowed with such bizarre anatomy ( thinking snood and caruncles) makes such an intriguing sound.
Okay, so THAT’s what that shite is called. Snood, caruncles. Practically onomonopaeadic. SP! Here, in fact, is the very turkey in question. Or rather the one who inspired my would-be flights of impersonator fancy:
Oops! Wrong pic! Make that,
There we go. You can’t really get a good visual on the snood or the caruncle (is that ever singular? as in, you never eat a singular grit, but only the plural grits?). But I promise you, I was really quite dumbstruck, staring at it close up, moments before. With the correct angle, you really can’t even divine that it’s a face of any sort. Eyes impossible to make out. Just, well. Amazingness.
Sinking oh so irreverently far from the Zen of your daughters wisdom…..as pigs bottoms go that’s a very clean bottom: bet you cant do piglet for long without giggling. Proper piglet that is.