chicken tic tac toe

In my auspicious home town there was once lovely store aptly named "The Country Store". Its difficult for me to describe how grand this store was. They had a fantastic shoe section (my love of shoes started early), sold industrial amounts of toilet paper in large cardboard boxes (before such things as Costco arrived), and had a Tic Tac Toe game where your opponent was a chicken. That's right. You could play Tic Tac Toe against a real, live, and dare I say cunning, chicken. Visits to this store always meant fun. And how could it not be? Honestly? I mean, you match wits with a chicken and then leave the store with the knowledge that the giant toilet paper box would soon turn into a play house. Like magic. All one had to do was to get an adult to turn the box upside down and cut out windows and a door. If you had a marker you could even tell the adults where to cut.

Little did I know that you can now play Tic Tac Toe against chickens in casinos all across this great land. Oh, and that the Country Store would soon die and be replaced with a Home Depot. Such is life.

I hope to never encounter chicken Tic Tac Toe again. I'd like to keep that one locked away in a happy place of distant memory rather than some smoke-filled, sleazy, small-town casino... not to mention that whole animal cruelty thing.