Free Armadillos & Old Lace by Kinky Friedman

lunch was always fried chicken and everybody wore their whites. It was Rosie and Elese’s fried chicken, but before that it’d been Louise’s fried chicken. Before that, long before any of the Bronco Busters had been bom, it was Hattie’s fried chicken. Before that the chicken had been running around pecking apple cores in the backyard of the Garden of Eden.
    The fried chicken was still great and, as always, a big favorite at Echo Hill. Seldom was heard a discouraging word like “cholesterol.” As Earl Buckelew once commented: “Hell, when I was growin’ up, we didn’t even know we had blood”
    I’d barely laid my hot green peppers out on the table—no Bronco Buster had ever eaten a hot pepper—when the kids began singing the noonday prayer. It was a little number from Johnny Appleseed and it went as follows:
    Oh the Lord is good to me
    And so I thank the Lord
    For giving me the things I need
    The sun and the rain and the appleseed
    The Lord's been good to me. Amen. Dig in.
    Eating a fried chicken lunch with a tableful of seven-year-olds will certainly take your mind off weightier matters. Along with the chicken and the mashed potatoes and gravy, the adult world with its ponderous problems just seems to disappear. Conversation is limited to bunkhouse activities, hikes, horses, snakes, water fights, softball, archery, and ri-flery. The subject of girls never even comes up.
    “Is Uncle Tom really your father?”
    “Yup.”
    “And Marcie’s your sister?”
    “Yup.”
    “Wow.”
    “My dad says he was in your bunk when you were ranchers and that one night you both snuck up and put horse manure in the counselor’s bed.”
    “Very possible.”
    “Don’t get any ideas,” said Ben, towering over the table like a giant Buddha.
    As I sat amongst the Bronco Busters, a gentle sense of arrested social development came over me. My gaze wandered across the crowded dining hall and my mind wandered back across the hot dusty summers to a time before any of these children were born. I remembered being seven years old myself and watching the oldest boys’ bunk playing with their food, mixing it with ketchup and bug juice in a bowl in the middle of the table. Their counselor that summer was an Israeli named Tuvia who’d fought in a number of wars and seen men starve to death in some godforsaken biblical desert. Tuvia took the bowl and three of the culprits away from the dining hall and apparently made them eat the mess, because I vividly remember hearing various retching noises occurring through the choruses as the rest of the ranch was singing a round called “I Like the Flowers.” From that day forth I’ve never had any inclination to play with food.
    There were two more things Tuvia did that I would never forget. Once, when the rope snapped during flag lowering and Old Glory fell to the ground with the whole camp standing at mute attention in a circle, Tuvia had snatched it up, put the rope in his teeth, and climbed the old cedar flagpole to tie the rope ends together. I remember thinking that he wasn’t even an American.
    The other thing Tuvia did was teach us a new bunk yell. It was almost forty years ago and I still remembered it. The bunk yell went precisely as follows:
    Avivo! Avavo!
    Avivo, vavo, voo-hey!
    Lefty, Befty, Billillilla Lefty,
    Chingala, Mingala,
    Loof, Loof Loof Yea, Bunk Seven!
    That was all in the mid-fifties before the bunks had names. Now Tuvia himself was just a name, remembered only by a very few of us. A member of a lost tribe that wanders somewhere within the soul. Sooner or later all of us would be members of that tribe.
    To the boisterous strains of “When They Built the Ship Titanic” I handed my plate and silverware to the ranch KP and slipped out ahead of the throng. I smoked a cigar by the old bell that stood by the office. I looked out at the empty flat soon to be swarming with scores of ranchers. From inside the dining hall the kids were now singing “Happy Birthday” to Eddie