Charlie and Other Roosters

1.

It was a Sunday morning last fall. We were walking downtown, Mass Street quiet and near empty. Edie in her stroller saw him first: perched on the bed-rail of a beaten Chevy pickup with his jaunty blue wings, russeted body, a dark green fan of tail feathers, red comb.

There was a man dropping off his wife or girlfriend at work at the hotel, or maybe he was meeting her on her morning break. They're locked in embrace beside the truck, but he sees us coming by, hears Edie talking, grins at us. He says, His name's Charlie--I've got him trained like a dog.

We stop so Edie can look at the rooster. The woman goes across the street to the hotel, back to work, and the man gets in his truck. Charlie sits next to him on the passenger seat on the way home.

2.

There's something about a rooster that begs for anthropomorphism of the beast fable/cartoon variety. There's a direct line from Chanticleer to Foghorn Leghorn.

Theprimary factor in this, it seems to me, is one that seems in fact counterintuitive. The rooster's appeal is so strong because of a trait that is not found in humans: that it is the male of the species and not the female that appears to be all gussied up with someplace to go. The male chicken is pretty--proud, regal, cocky to boot, a damned fine looking bird in general. The brashness of the colors at a glance is balanced out by the subtlety of the tones when you look at a particular part of the bird. The fine coloration and the sturdy posture are entirely undermined, though--turned comic, ridiculous--when you take into account the limp flap of a red comb that clashes with the refined beauty of the feathers.

No doubt the rooster's pride is not hurt by anything I could ever say, and indeed I have nothing but affection for the dapper little fellows. Chaunticleer is easily my favorite character in Chaucer's arsenal: he's Foghorn Leghorn before cartoon animation. It's the same thing, in essence: madcap tomfoolery with a moral lesson. When a whole village full of people, various random animals, and a hive of bees all chase Reynard the Fox (with Chanticleer caught in his jaws) through the woods, those of us who grew up with Looney Toons know that we have seen this kind of thing before.

Though Chanticleer has license that we do not--he has seven wives--his follies are human ones amplified. Pretty fellow, he is literally the most hen-pecked of us all.