Catching Up Part 4

The Target Chicken

Anna and I recently went on a little shopping trip to Target in the nearby farm town that actually has a Target (our liberal little college down has a thing against large discount retailers). We were driving through the parking lot, congested with holiday shopping traffic, looking for a space when we saw a chicken. I do not usually see chickens in the parking lots of large discount retailer stores, but Anna confirmed that yes, she saw it too. Either we were sharing identical hallucinations, or there was, in fact, a chicken in the Target parking lot. We laughed as we found this funny and decided that it must be photographed. I parked the car and retrieved the camera from my man purse. We headed off to find the chicken in the next lane over where we had last seen it.

A woman in a large sport utility vehicle stopped next to us. "Are you gonna catch that chicken?"

I didn't take my eyes off the chicken -- it was moving away from us and I didn't want to lose it -- I found it difficult to line up a shot on a moving chicken, but I'm not the most experienced photographer in the world. "No, but I'm going to photograph it." I replied out of the side of my mouth.

"There's a chicken over there!" The woman replied.

I'm not sure where this woman learned to communicate, but I'm led to believe that she could have been taught better. Let's review the exchange:

1) The woman inquired as to whether we were going to attempt to capture the chicken
2) I replied that no, we were not going to attempt to capture the chicken, but rather to photograph it -- nowhere during this exchange did I say "What chicken?" or anything else to indicate that I was not aware of the presence of the chicken.
3) Despite providing the woman with serious reason to believe that I was aware of the presence of the chicken she still cries out: "There's a chicken over there!"

My goodness.

That is all.

Thanks for playing.