Quite a while back, I don't know how long, I'd say when I was about nine, my family was living in Salt Lake City. I know that I've said that I just flew out of there, but my family has this tendency to move a lot. At the time, this was probably our fourth or fifth time living in Utah.
My youngest brother has Aspergers (don't quote me on the spelling), and with that comes certain occasions where he needs comforting. Just a thought though, my brother is like the coolest kid in the world. He's a flipping beast when it comes to Legos, and I am insanely jealous.
Say there was a crazy person contest. Then, my parents signed up for said competition. They would be immediately disqualified, since professionals aren't allowed.
Ok, I lied. They'd be arrested on the spot.
Alright, they aren't that crazy. They're good people, just a little insane sometimes.
This is one of those times.
My brother had just had some kind of incident, and my mom couldn't calm him down. So she did the most random thing ever.
She whipped out a rubber chicken.
It wasn't like an adorable chicken, it was like one of these things. Uuuuugly.
Yeah. For whatever reason, maybe their was a birthday party in Asgard, or perhaps the daleks were finally wiped out, it totally chilled him out. My mom wiggled (wiggled) it to make it look like it was dancing, and it worked. Completely calmed down.
Please allow me to interject. What to the flying crap? I didn't understand how this ugly monstrosity worked as a stress reliever. It made no sense to my nine-year-old mind, and it still doesn't.
The next step in my mom's plan to implement this thing was to name it. My little brother quickly came up with a name.
"Well he dances, he's made of rubber, and he's a chicken. We'll call him D.R.C."
To make it less syllables, we added a few letters and called him Dirtch.
Somehow, that chicken became part of the family. Everybody started to enjoy his presence. Even I started to like hanging out with him.
I say hanging out on purpose, mind you. At the time, it was me and my two brothers (both younger) that would play together, and we used Dirtch all the time. He was like the duct tape of play time. Add him to any sort of activity, and it suddenly became a bajillion times better.
We made a fatal mistake one day.
Because Dirtch was rubber, we could stretch any part of him in any which way. One of those stretchy parts was the neck.
Getting hit with Dirtch was like getting smacked across the hand by a baby kitten, mewling at you with giant eyes, and trusting you with it's life. It was that gentle.
Since my autistic brother was more on the physically sensitive side, pillow fights were out of the question. Sooo we played this deranged version of dodge ball where Dirtch was the projectile.
We'd grasp his head in between our thumb and index finger, and then pull back his body with our free hand. Shooting him across the room was pretty similar to shooting a rubber band or slingshot.
This warfare continued without knowledge from my parents for some time. We noticed the wrinkles in Dirtch's neck, but we figured that was just from aging (yes, we thought he actually aged).
On one particular day, one of us three, not sure which one, fired Dirtch across the room. Apparently the stress was just too much for the poor chicken, and he gave up on us. In one hand was his body... in the other, his head.
If you think you know true sadness, you should have seen how we all reacted to his death.
We.
Were.
Sobbing.
We had become so attached to that rubber thing, that we were crying for two hours over his death. My mom thought it was hilarious, but pretended to feel remorse at the time. She sat us down and explained that sometimes people die and we don't know why. She said we'd have a funeral for him, so we could properly say good bye.
At the time we lived in this apartment complex thingy (not sure what the correct terminology is, since their were only four separate living spaces). On the side of the house-thing that ran next to the road was this giant boulder next to a tree. The perfect spot.
We dug out a space roughly twelve inches long, eight inches wide, and 4 inches deep, and placed Dirtch and his head in the whole. After a eulogy in the language of a five year old, we covered up the grave. I wrote out Dirtch's headstone with a sharpie marker on a rock, and put it at the head of the grave. The tone was somber for the next couple days.
This was the first time that my mom explained death to me. With a rubber chicken.
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
ReplyDelete