"Oh, look. We have the white chicken in our bed. I have to go get the number off the pole and call now."
This is the combination of words Sal just said about 20 minutes ago as he happened to glance out the kitchen window, then took off out the front door. What the what?
I'm in full-on does-not-compute-blue-screen-of-death-void-null-error mode. Chicken? What chicken? "The chicken" implies a specific chicken, an expected one, which is odd since we don't, you know, have any chickens. The little hamster wheels in my brain are spinning furiously as I try to sort out what he's just said, trailing behind him in the blazing heat. (Trying to figure out wtf he was talking about was the only thing that could've enticed me outside at these temperatures.) The "bed" part I realize must be one of the raised garden beds, but what the everloving hell does a pole (light? telephone? North?) and a number have to do with anything?
By the time I get to the front porch, I have concocted a rough theory that there's a white chicken statue/figurine/object of some sort that has been left in our garden bed by some mysterious prankster, and that this is a random underground Portlandia sort of game that Sal has heard about and knows what's required next. That this white chicken whatever-the-hell has a phone number on it that you're supposed to call when you find the chicken for your instructions on where to leave it next. I haven't quite figured out how the pole fits into the scheme of things, but I'm only about 10 seconds into this adventure so it's early yet.
Welcome to the inside of my brain. It's scary in here.
Sal's down to the street level by this point and hollers over his shoulder to watch the chicken. As one does. So I did. I go around the side of the house to the garden beds and I hear rustling and then see a dart of white and then feathers. "WHAT." I'm loud enough for the neighbors to hear. There is an actual white chicken darting around our yard. My brain-hamsters are now no longer in their wheels, but instead running madly about and crashing into each other.
Nothing like the chicken in question. You know Portland, we're all about the heirloom varieties.So there's a "Lost Chicken" flyer on the lightpole at the corner of our street (not as uncommon as you'd think) that Sal noticed on his bike rides and turns out, it's the very white chicken in our yard that I'm at that very moment "WHAT"-ing about while he's calling the number on the flyer.
He has to leave a voicemail, but must first listen to a long message because the number is apparently for a business, and the message is about hoop yoga classes, because of course it is. As he waits to leave the message about their lost white chicken running around in our yard, he says, "Well I feel like a true Portlander now."
(A few minutes after leaving the message, the chicken flew clear across the street and the neighbor's house/yard into Baltimore Woods, and there's probably a "why did the chicken cross the road" joke in there but I can't tease it out because my brain is still rebooting.)
*Title taken from a famous Lewis Black routine.