"Curiouser and curiouser."
— Lewis Carroll (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass)
I do not remember much about my childhood. I grew up in a big family and we moved around a lot. My father worked for the German company Siemens as a mechanical engineer and he also loved to travel, so he took the family through various states in Nigeria whenever he transferred in my younger days, everybody stopped whatever they were doing and moved with him. Eventually, though, the family got too big to travel at the same time. So, he would travel with one of the wives and leave everybody else behind.
Sometime in 1978 or 1979, we settled permanently in Festac Town, an urban development in Lagos, remnants of the Festac 1977 Festival. The travels and transfers lessened, and we children had time to grow roots and make friends. Festac was a relatively new town then, but there were nice neighbors and the children always played together, after school, on the weekends, and on long summer holidays spent roaming the streets and getting into all kinds of mischief.
I remember this particular summer; It was not too bad but it rained a lot and we children did not get to play and roam like we usually did. My household had a lot of children and it was heaven to just get out and even be by yourself once in a while. I liked to read and had already exhausted all my father’s books (Forbidden Land, Buried Gold and Anacondas, all the Reader’s Digest magazines, old newspapers, and anything readable I could lay my hands on).
On this day the rain had been intense, then steady, and eventually it drizzled for a couple of hours, and like magic just after noon, the sun came out. There was no rainbow, but it was fine with us. As soon as our parents permitted, all the children flooded out of their homes and converged at the popular meeting place between my house and our adjacent neighbor’s house, only separated by a row of shrubs. Immediately, we noticed it: a fairly-sized chicken shivering under one of the little shrubs, cold and unable to move, its head cocked to one side.
“Awwwwww……” one of the neighbor’s kids said. “It’s cold and lonely!”
“What are we going to do with it?’ said another.
“We need to help the chicken get better,” I said. But how do we do that? We couldn’t certainly pour hot water on the chicken, or its feathers would come off and it could possibly be meat for the soup pot. One kid suggested we give it aspirin, but all the others shook their heads in disagreement. I carried the chicken from under the shrubs to an open space. It was clearly very weak. We all debated what to do with this poor chicken for a while until someone suggested a shot.
“We can’t give it a shot; we don’t have needles.”
“Oh yes we do,” I said. “In fact, we have plenty of needles.” My stepmom was a seamstress and her sewing machine sat in the garage surrounded by all kinds of prickly things.
“Oh no, it will die!” exclaimed one of my friends. I was already running inside the house. I made my way to the garage, searched, and there it was, a shiny, medium-sized sewing needle, poking from a cushion. I pulled it out and ran back outside. Before anybody could say a word, I softly poked the chicken with the needle. Nothing.
“It won’t work.”
I poked gently again. Nothing.
“Maybe we should light a fire for it.”
“You know we can’t do that.”
I poked the chicken again, harder this time.
Like lightning, that chicken picked itself up and ran with its little legs as fast as it could away from us as we watched in amazement. It never looked back. We did not attempt to run after it. I cannot even remember if we laughed or not. But it was nice to see that chicken run rather than sit shivering. Mission accomplished. We all scattered to find other mischievous things to do.
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