Chicken Little

In “Fiddler on the Roof,” the people were so poor that at the wedding the bride’s parents gave the young couple a feather bed, two pillows, and a pair of candlesticks. Then the butcher stepped forward and impressed the wedding guests with a gift of five chickens: “One for every Sabbath dinner for the first five weeks of their married life together.”

This reminded me of going with my grandmother to visit her sister in Rockwall. Today the trip from Fort Worth to Rockwall takes an hour by expressway without a single stop light. We sped along that route following the hearse going to bury my grandmother beside her husband, who died 60 years before. In the same plot are the graves of my grandmother’s and grandfather’s parents and several of my grandmother’s siblings. One little boy’s marker is a small column with a curious peaked globe on top. Among the many graves my daughter looked for that strange little monument to locate our ancestors when she went to the cemetery on a visit to Texas from Chicago.

In the 1930's the trip from Fort Worth to Rockwall in my grandmother’s Ford took all day. We drove through little towns of Handley (now part of Fort Worth), Arlington, and Grand Prairie, with open fields in between. At Dallas we passed under the triple underpass and then all the stop lights of downtown and the streets of Lakeview, where we stopped at the bakery to buy a loaf of special bread for Aunt Lou.

As my grandmother’s car headed northeast out of Dallas, I looked out the windows at cotton fields on both sides of the two-lane highway. At Garland we passed a filling station and a hamburger stand but nothing more, not even a stop light. My grandmother would point out, a quarter-mile off the highway, a couple of buildings which she called, “Rowlett.” Today the entire area is built up, all one giant Metroplex with millions of people. Garland alone has 270,000 people. When I follow the route of the old highway from Garland to Rockwall, I drive on a six-lane highway with commercial buildings along most of 16 miles. I see McDonald’s and Wendy’s, Wal-Mart and Home Depot, but no remains of the one-room schoolhouse, “Happy Home School,” where a dirt road turned off to “the farm,” inherited by my mother and her brother, on which a share-cropper raised cotton. Today that farm lies beneath Lake Ray Hubbard.

We did not stop at the farm when I went to Rockwall with my grandmother. Finally, after an all-day trip, we crossed the river and went up the hill to the domed court house on the square. We were in Rockwall, and Aunt Lou’s house was only three blocks away. After such a journey, we always stayed for several days.

Aunt Lou’s husband was a doctor, the only doctor in Rockwall County. Once while we were there, he was called out in the country to deliver a baby. When he came home, Aunt Lou asked, “Did you get paid?”

“Yes,” the doctor said. “Two Chickens”

We had fried chicken for dinner.

No one wants to go back to the days when a doctor was paid two chickens for delivering a baby. Even today, when we are facing the worst economic times since the Great Depression, no one talks about doctors reducing their fees. Yet doctors in the U.S. make far more money than in any other nation in the World!