There it was, two weeks or so after the first meal, sitting on the windowsill: dry, brittle.
I presented it to my daughter without comment. She inspected both sides carefully, looking for the weakness. Satisfied, she grabbed one end of the wishbone and nodded.
"You sure? Looks like you took the weak side," I said.
"I want you to get your wish," she said.
I grabbed the other end and pulled, a wish in mind.
Snap!
*
One medium-sized chicken goes a long way in a family of three, thankfully.
We'd roasted the bird on a Saturday afternoon, served it with homemade sourdough bread and a salad of late-season lettuce and onion procured for short money at a nearby farm stand. With half the chicken left—one wing, one leg, one breast plus the carcass—we figured we'd get another two meals: a soup and a lunch of cold leftovers. As I cleaned up from the first feast, I put the carcass in a pot to simmer, the rest of the meat in the fridge and the wishbone—the furcula, the forked bone between the breast and neck of birds (and theropod dinosaurs)—on the windowsill.
Before we were done, the chicken had provided an essential ingredient to a total of five meals: the first dinner, cold leftovers the next day, a chicken salad for sandwiches, a stew and a soup.
The chicken came from the Big Y for the price of about $11, buy one, get one free. So two chickens for less than $6 a piece. If the second chicken, now in the freezer, yields another five meals, we'll have our per-meal chicken cost down below a dollar.
We haven't always needed to be quite so frugal, and even now, we aren't so strapped that we'd go hungry if I didn't know how to stretch a chicken. Still, with money tight and no obvious signs of things loosening up soon, there's no sense in being wasteful.
For my wife and me, the poor economy of late has been both a struggle and a blessing. While, by American standards, neither of us has ever been rich, by world standards, neither have we ever been truly poor. We both grew up in middle-class homes, where money was always tight, but never desperately so. Both of us were raised on values that, even by the 1960s, still echoed the lessons of the Great Depression.
As adults, we frequently ignored what we were taught as kids, joining at times rapaciously in a kind of throw-away consumption that, even at the time, seemed too easy, too excessive, too unsustainable.
We'd love it if the economy hadn't tanked, if our home was still worth what it was a few years ago, if our retirement account hadn't lost more than a third its value. On the other hand, if things had stayed the same, what values would our daughter have learned? Would we have prepared her, as our parents prepared us, to live in a world where nothing is guaranteed?
My daughter held the bigger piece of wishbone aloft in victory.
"Did you make a wish?" I asked.
"Yes, I wished for a&"
"Don't tell me if you want it to come true," I warned.
"Well, I think you'll like what I wished for," she said, "because I wished it for you."
"Did you really?"
"Yes. Know why?" she said. "Because I already have everything I need.""
