*창가의 토토를 읽고 <1> 제목: 날아라 병아리

[1234]

"What is the best early training for a writer?"

"An unhappy childhood."

“The only thing I want!” p 83

 Crom wrote a song for himself on his first experience of loss and separation. His little pale-yellow feathered friend, Nari, filled his room with delight and soon parted an eternal company as the other millions of chicks sold at the school gates. They were so cute and adorable, wiggling their tiny bottoms and cheeping aloud in the box.

 “Those chicks die in a flash!, often reprimanded the teacher in school, being cross with us for being so dumb enough to fall for a vendor's trick and also for exchanging a 500 ml school milk for a mal-nutritious ice-cream.  I would also buy a few of them and learned how sad it was to part from a little companion. There was however one that lived against all odds. I fed him or her, who knew its gender, with an obscure class of rocusts that I would catch in a dark storage room. It survived a winter, a season at least. On a spring day, I'd let it loose in the lawn. How energetic it was! It sauntered across the backyard, and at interval pecking some of the pettiest particles of pebbles. Such a pleasure as much as walking a dog! Having noticed white plumes well-groomed here and there. "Another season, it'd sure grow to be a hen or rooster", I had thought. Up to this day, I still wonder how it disappeared. Could it have been a stray cat or a bird of prey? In a flick of seconds, the young hen was nowhere to be seen.

 I took care so much of my chick that I even called from school to see how it was doing at home. Mom was plainly worried that I would lag behind in class, becoming a bird brained pupil because of a little worthless pet bird. I didn't feel sad or bitter after the incident. I was , however, rather enraptured in its mystery of disappearance.