Chicken Waste

This story is not what you think....

Tonight we had several friends for Shabbes dinner.   One guest is very Jewishly observant.   The other couple were not Jewish.   As the night went on, our guest couple were asking questions about rules of Shabbes and Kosher.   This reminded me of the following story:

My maternal grandfather Manny (Emanuel) Miller lived with my family from my birth till his death in 1958.  He was a gentle soul, a singer, of songs, and a story teller.   I as the only grand kid present benefitted from his stories and could hear each in his repertoire hundreds of times.

When Manny was  a teenager, his parents emigrated from Ukraine to South Africa.   There was not enough money for all to travel, so he was left behind for a while to live in a small village with a relative.  The family had a chicken that was  dying.   The family could not eat this chicken if it was not slaughtered "kosher."   My grandfather got the task of running to the nearby village to have a "Shochet" appropriately slaughter the chicken so it could be eaten.   So he told of grabbing the dying chicken by the neck and desperately running to town.   Despite his best efforts, the chicken died  before he got to town.  And to my amazement, my granddaddy told me the potentially great food was wasted.   This was a very big tragedy, given the family's poverty.

In my minds eye, I picture my granddaddy as a tall and gawky teenager, old clothes, dusty country road, chicken held by neck, trying desperately to get to town.   And though I didn't understand it at the time, I somehow did and do sense the enormity of this waste.  Did my grandfather get blamed?   I don't know.   He certainly felt responsible.   Perhaps he cried. 

These stories sit in my childhood memory as small fragments.   I have little context, I can't picture the relatives, the house, the village.   But my childhood imagination created an intense clip of memory that is so clear to me that if I didn't know better, I'd believe I actually saw.....granddaddy, chicken, road, running, running running, NO!