My father was, by nature, a cheerful, kindly man.Until he was thirty-four years old he worked as a farm-hand for Thomas Butterworth near the town of Bidwell, Ohio.On Saturday evenings he drove his horse into town to spend a few hours in social intercourse with other farm-hands.He was quite happy in his position in life. It was in his thirty-fifth year that father married my mother, a school teacher.Something happened to the two people.The American passion for getting up in the world took possession of them.Mother induced father to give up his place as a farm-hand, sell his horse and start an independent enterprise of his own.They rented ten acres of poor stony land and launched into chicken raising. One inexperienced in such matters can have no idea of the many and tragic things that can happen to a chicken.It is born out of an egg, lives for a few weeks as a tiny fluffy thing, then becomes naked, gets diseases, and dies.A few hens, and now and then a rooster, intended to serve God's mysterious ends, struggle through to maturity.The hens lay eggs out of which come other chickens and the awful cycle is thus made complete.It is all unbelievably complex. _ .One hopes for so much from a chicken and is so awfully disappointed.Small chickens, look so bright and in fact so awfully stupid.They are so much like people they mix one up in one's judgments of life.If disease does not kill them they wait until your expectations are thoroughly aroused and then walk under the wheels of a carriage. In later life I have seen how a literature has been built up on the subject of fortunes to be made out of the raising of chickens.It is intended to be read by the gods who have just eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.It is a hopeful literature and declares that much may be done by simple ambitious people who own a few hens.Do not be misguided by it.It was not written for you.Go hunt for gold on the frozen hills of Alaska, put your faith in the honesty of a politician, believe if you will that good will defeat evil, but do not read and believe the literature that is written concerning the hen. For ten years my father and mother struggled to make our chicken farm pay and then they gave up that struggle and began another.They moved into the town of Bidwell, Ohio and began the restaurant business, with the tiny hope of looking for a new place from which to start on our upward journey through life. What's the author's attitude towards parents' dream of rise to success?
approving optimistic skeptical indifferent