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The Chicken Neck

No matter what you do, everyone always has distinctive tastes. My siblings and I were all more or less raised the same way, and we all steadfastly try to clear our plates. That doesn't mean that we all appreciate the same dishes, though, or that we approach meals the same way. Like I said, personal taste always factors in at some point, and different human beings are bound to have different predilections for food. It's just how it goes.

Anyhow, that means that whenever we eat any kind of a bird (chicken, turkey, hen, you get the idea), everyone has their favorite part. For example, my sister has always been a fan of the drumsticks, I'm partial to the dark meat, and my mom generally prefers wings. We don't actually pick through the plate to ensure we get our favorite parts, since that's always been considered gauche at our dinner table. Still, if the nearest piece happens to line up with our preferences, we always grab it with glee and relish the food just a little bit more. It's a little bit like winning the dinner lottery.

The one exception to this has always been the little tiny piece of tail bone on a roasted chicken. It's not nearly big enough to be an entire piece of food, and it mostly just gets in the way when you're cutting up a chicken. So, the person cutting up the chicken usually chops it right off and then goes about the business of actually cutting up the chicken. However, my mom likes that little piece of meat, so we all universally chop it off and then put it on her plate. I don't quite remember how or when this became a fact of life, but it did. It's one of those things that you happen to know about your family members by virtue of having known them a really long time.

Well, to keep the story moving along, we were all seated for dinner a while back, and we had roasted chicken for dinner. I don't remember who was slicing up the chicken, but my sister made some remark along the lines of, "make sure mom gets the neck." Now, we all knew what part of the chicken's anatomy she meant, but the tail bone was most certainly not the neck. So I laughingly pointed out that most chickens don't have necks between their legs. To her credit, my sister immediately realized her mistake. To her further credit, she then carried on with jokes about how this chicken was special, and she didn't care what anyone said, that was a neck (well, "pescuezo" to use the actual Spanish word that came up).

And thus, a family gag was born. To this day, if you chop off the tailbone on the bird, there are about fifty-fifty odds that someone will call in the neck.

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