My Mother, the Sweetest Old Lady Murderer in Town

My mother is 86, with failing eye sight and a wicked, lively sense of humor and independence. I love her unconditionally, which is a good thing, considering her brush with cold-blooded murder many decades ago.

This is the sort of tale that comes back to haunt me each and every spring, as Easter grows close. It's been the source of family jokes and fodder for debate for literally decades, and dates back to the year when I was seven...

I grew up in my grandparents' home in Baltimore, Maryland. We were a large, extended family of several generations. One of my favorite relatives living with us all was my Uncle Ben, who was 20 at the time of "the incident".

Ben was the kind of relative that every kid dreams of having in their family. He was only 13 years older than I, the only son in the family, "spoiled" and privileged since birth, with an enormous capacity for fun and mischief. Once, he brought home, unannounced, a puppy for my brother and myself. (Actually, I think he was the one who really wanted the pup for himself, but we kids were its designated 'owners' of record.) My grandmother - a European immigrant who lived and died by the cleanliness of her house, and loved, loved, loved the idea of plastic seat covers on every sofa and chair in the house - was devastated. The dog, whose name was long forgotten, lived with us for about six weeks before mysteriously finding a "home in the country with a very nice older couple". (My uncle stuck to this story literally until his dying day.) He would often pick us up from school and take us out for ice cream before dinner. He was really just a big kid himself.

And that's how we came into possessions of the chicks.

I grew up during the '50s, when we Americans were studiously ignorant of environmental and animal rights issues, due to a collective lack of common sense, apparently. Bad Boy Uncle bought my brother and I each a baby chick for Easter.

As was often the case growing up, mysteriously 'my' chick was sickly, my brother's pretty sturdy (at least, this is what I was later told.) In our crowded, chaotic household, somehow my mother thought that putting 'my' chick, wrapped in a dish towel, in a very low heated gas oven would revive it. She did this late on Easter Saturday night, while finishing off the Easter Bunny's other duties of dying and hiding eggs and candies inside the house. Apparently she didn't realize that putting a very young chick into a gas oven was not the wisest of ideas...

The end result was that we could have all merrily enjoyed an Easter dinner appetizer of tiny, gassed baby roast chick the next day.

My brother received 'his' chick that day; I received a profuse apology from my uncle and my mother.

I never did, thankfully, view the tiny chick corpse, nor did I ever really receive an honest explanation as to why and how it was MY chick that bit the proverbial dust, and not my brother's. A chick is a chick is a chick...

If there's a moral to this rather unsettling childhood memory, this may be it: Some things are just best forgotten. It's been over fifty years since that sunny, warm Easter Sunday morning, and I still remember that day much too vividly. Mommy dearest, j'accuse!