Saga of the Slip-up, or In a Perfect World This Never Would’ve Happened

We’ve just departed for the school when Son calls—we made the trip up yesterday, spent the night at his house. He’s gotten an email from Grandgirl’s teacher, reports Son. She didn’t think to get us cleared. Well, I say, we’ll see what happens. After her hours of travel and overnight seclusion, Henny is still in the car trunk, cluck-clucking softly.

It’s good we got off early.

Paulson drops me off—he must find a place to park. So up the grand steps I go, alone. I buzz. Through the glass, Office Lady descends the staircase. She blocks me just inside the door.

She’s so sorry about the slip-up.

Not even grandparents are allowed in? I ask. Aren’t parents? Oh my no, she says, not without clearance.

We drove the whole way here for this, I say. I possess a teaching certificate from the state of West Virginia, I say. My husband taught for many years in West Virginia schools. (As if that might possibly make a difference, haha.) No no, says Office Lady, you’ve not been approved.

She hesitates. By now she’s granted Paulson entrance.

Let me see what I can do, says Office Lady. I’ll have to track down the principal. She tells us to move up to the main level, put on visitor stickers, and go through security. And off she bustles.

Security Officer, when Paulson empties his pockets onto the table, about falls over. Paulson scrabbles for his penknife, offers to take it to the car. Stupid, stupid! What was he thinking! He runs his contraband out. He returns. We step through the metal detector, no screaming sirens. Then we wait.

Office Lady appears. Okay, she says, come along. Uh, says Paulson, we brought a chicken. Let me go get it. Office Lady leaps to a closet, pulls out a huge blue cloth for him to throw over the cage, shoos him out. Soon she’s buzzing him in again, and his armload, the cloth nearly dragging on the ground. He’s also brought my bag of supplies. If anybody asks, says Officer Lady when we’re fixing the cloth so it’s less lopsided, you tell them I didn’t see any chicken.

This time we breeze right past Security Officer. He only glances down into my bag, doesn’t paw. The cloth flapping around Paulson’s burden, we file down the hall past staring children lined up to go somewhere, and when we reach the kindergarten room there’s Grandgirl on the story rug, near the back of the crowd, shy. All the littles on their rears, Mrs. Teacher is wisely circling, concerned about attention spans.

Reading, I ignore the bundle sitting nearby on a desk. When I get to the part in the book where the father clips the wings of the boy’s chickens because they’ve been escaping their fence (which upsets the mother—the father using her scissors), I stop and pull out mine. This shocks Mrs. Teacher. How did scissors get through? I hurry through the rest of the story, as time is zipping by, and then Paulson pulls Henny from under the cloth, tucks her close, and hacks off some feathers. It doesn’t hurt, he says. It’s like getting a haircut. More always grow.

He passes around the tub of corn and chicken feed I packed. Corn is too hard, the mother in the story tells the boy. Chickens don’t have teeth. So she cooks a big batch. Paulson also lays out the eggs—two raw and one I boiled—and demonstrates the trick at the back of the book for telling which is which. (Hint: spin the egg.)

As the children melt away for recess, Grandgirl lost in the shuffle, Mrs. Teacher thanks us profusely. We begin cleaning up the feather scraps but she tells us to stop—no worries, no worries! We let the eggs with her, too, and my book, and Paulson shrouds Henny for her return journey down the hall.

Then we’re driving away, once again in the land of freedom, the whole ordeal behind us. Not freedom freedom, but not checkpoints, either, to keep out shooters. In a world gone to pot, this barricading. Henny’s long stuffy ride could’ve been for nothing.