The Practical Body

There are disadvantages to having legs no longer than a turkey does - like me. But have you ever seen a turkey run?
I don't mean one of those poor white, breast-enhancement victims who can't even copulate without a saddle and a wrangler.
I mean a wild, bronze-'back, native American turkey, as in the song:

"Another man done gone,
like a turkey through the corn".

Wild turkeys can fly, but with those legs they generally don't need to.
The turkeys on our hill roost at night high up in the pines, make just one long flight a day down to the water, and then spend the rest of the day walking and feeding up the hill.
That is the turkey way.
I have often lived that life myself, more or less, and anyway I've got that dark brontasaural leg-meat. Short and Springy are my two legs.
I am especially well proportioned for up or down hill runs, for scooting over rough or broken ground, and through Alders, Brambles, and Buckthorns.

Yeah, but beyond pedestrian activities, my unusual proportions have been a big natural advantage in about everything I have chosen to do: which does not include pushing your normal height wheelbarrow, but does include writing with this here laptop computer. I can sit on the floor of my little house with the clam shell open on my shins and adjust the screen-angle with my feet, like I just did. Or I can stand with it open on the feed bowl and rock around it typing like Jerry Lee Lewis, like I am doing now.
This thing is my best toy or tool since my Magic Slate . I am glad that we left it open under a leaking skylight so that my brother had to get a new one, and fix this one up for me.
Years ago, in the seventies, I taught myself to type using four finger (six if you count the thumbs) pecking and punching a manual acoustic Remington office machine abandoned by the Cornell English Department when they went electric. It was in Alan Pike's Goldwyn Smith Hall office way upstairs in the garret. That's where l wrote the Little book of Wise Cracks which I xeroxed, and sold on the street. It was all short and to the point, not that many words, and not much typing really. Now, if I type for hours at a time with this computer on my lap ( no matter how well proportionally I am suited to it) I get stiff as yesterdays deceased, even if I am sitting straight. I don't see how all those big-leg professional writers and typers in offices
can endure to lay it down all day like factory chickens. Writing couldn't be a very healthful profession. I would rather be roofing.

Rusty Hen is in with me just now, and has taken an interest in my key-board pecking behavior, which is just about the same action that I use to get the chicks to eat whatever.
Now she is pecking at the quotation marks and, of course, only producing a comma on screen.
I think I'll discourage her from writing and trying to make sense in such a complicated and indirect way.

We communicate very well by being more direct: Right now, she is curious about my activity but she has let me know that she is primarily here to ask if I have any pancakes on me.
David makes pancakes most every day and the chickens get most of them.
The economy of this really makes very little sense to one who has lived on the edge, but beyond that consideration, he always includes at least one egg per batch of pancake batter, and that is just plain taboo.
I have told David that there are very good health and Superstition reasons he shouldn't feed chickens their own eggs.

But I just work here .
I started this post to be about the advantages of my unique body type, and I see that I haven't gotten down the list to what are really my main practical abilities.
But right now the Penny Lane thinks that she is stuck on the wrong side of the road so I need to close the clam shell, go outside, and crow her across.

William D. B.Warren