Chicken Little

We have all come to take exact measures for granted. Oh, we have occasional quarrel between metric and non-metric. Liters may well replace quarts, but kilometers will never replace miles in our poetic or Madison Avenue imaginings. ("And I have promises to keep/and kilometers to go before I sleep" just doesn't scan. Nor does "I'd walk a kilometer for a camel.") Sometimes standard sizes aren't quite - years ago I learned the hard way that a medium Polo shirt manufactured in Sri Lanka fit comfortably, while one made in the Philippines hugged my torso like a bustier.

But we have come to expect a certain degree of standardization. The exception, of course, is those things found in nature that we are hopefully will never be all that standardized. (I hated the idea of the square tomatoes that were rumored a while back.) These items we pay by the pound for. Thus, I can buy a big watermelon or a little watermelon and get precisely what I paid for.

A couple of weeks ago, my husband - recovering from surgery - decided that a chicken sandwich would taste good to him. Although even a non-cook like myself could manage to roast a chicken and slice it up for a sandwich, a friend had recommended the roasted chicken at our neighborhood market. At the meat counter, I asked the butcher for a roasted chicken. He handed me a plastic container that held the largest chicken I had ever seen. $6.99. I brought it home, where my husband and I ooh'd and aah'd over the heft of my formerly feathered friend. "It looks like a turkey," Jim said. And indeed it did. I didn't weigh it, but it was clear that it actually cost less to buy this chicken already-roasted than it would have if I'd bought it by the pound and thrown it in the over myself.

Sometimes large is not better, but this chicken was meaty, flavorful, succulent. We feasted on chicken and cucumber sandwiches. The chicken lasted for three days.

Fast forward a week. My husband is still recovering, still craving chicken, but now able to make it to the corner store on his own.

I came home one evening to find a partially eaten chicken carcass on the kitchen counter.

"Is it my imagination...." I started to ask.

"No," Jim assured me. "It's about half the size."

"How much?" I asked.

"6.99."

I'm assuming the first chicken - a veritable Foghorn Leghorn - was a fluke, and that the second round's meager Easter chick is what we are more likely to find next time we ask for a roasted chicken.

From a business standpoint, Chicken #1 was a delighter, Chicken #2 a disappointment. But it makes no sense to me in either case why we weren't paying by the pound. Just when I'm beginning to think that I have business figured out, there is something new and wondrous to astound me.