Lenny Brown

LENNY BROWN was a real Renaissance Man. In a town of less than 500, that was a feat in itself, but he was the sensitive artistic type that is always associated with being a Renaissance Man. He was a philosopher whenever he could get a person to listen. He was a painter—you know the type that paints portraits or landscapes on old eyeglass lenses and sells them at the county fair or local craft show. Most of all, he fancied himself an inventor.

In most things, you wouldn’t call him pretentious, but he did have the ego to blush whenever anyone called him Leonardo da Brown, which he insists he never started but accepted as a plaudit from his friends and neighbors. There was some resemblance after he grew a beard, but he never did learn Italian—or Latin for that matter.

Lenny once invented a chicken plucking machine for the farm, but it proved more difficult to operate than just dunking the headless birds in scalding water and pulling the feathers out by hand. And when it came down to it, chicken-farming was the bread and butter on the table, so Lenny didn’t let any of his own inventions interfere with the profitability of the old ranch.

I suppose the most notable thing was Lenny’s fascination with flying. Not airplanes, nor rockets. Good old-fashioned flap-your-arms flying machines. He studied some of the Renaissance drawings of wings and some of da Vinci’s concepts of flight, then set out to reconstruct those marvelous experiments. For nearly two years, every eyeglass lens painting he sold had a bird in it. For over a year, his house smelled like a rendering plant as he boiled the meat off the bones of fowl and attempted to reconstruct the perfect design of wings. After the gluing together of the bones, he began on models, carefully weighing the materials and gradually building bigger and bigger wing models, with two joints and various lightweight mechanisms for extending and retracting the wings, and with various fabrics as a base for the feathers covering them.

Finally, the day came when Lenny was ready to test his creation and he invited Rev. Stone and the deacons over after church on Sunday to get the proper blessings said. He mounted the roof of the chicken coup where his wonderful flying machine awaited him.

It was a beautiful day and we watched from below as he strapped his contraption on. The chicken coup was not the tallest building on the farm, but Lenny had a bit of a fear of heights and didn’t feel comfortable climbing to the top of the barn or the silo. He figured most birds could get into flight without such a long drop to the ground and he could too.

It was an impressive sight as he stretched those beautiful new wings out against the clear blue sky. A slight breeze rose to meet him as he stepped to the edge and launched out over the chicken lot.

For one long and breathtaking moment after he took that final hop into space, the wings stretched out, catching the breeze. His legs dangled down pumping as if he were on a bicycle. We gasped for fear he would come crashing to the ground in a tangle of binder twine and burlap. And in the next moment that is exactly what he did.

The wings were a total loss. We gathered around Lenny fearing the worst. He moaned and pulled his arms out of the tangled mess and rolled over. His face and clean bib overalls were covered with chicken droppings and he scooped a big handful of the same up and flung it at his feet. We didn’t know what to say. He lay there on his back looking the worst for it, staring into the sky with a dazed look on his face—along with the other stuff. He raised a hand and pointed to the sky with a long sigh and we looked up to see a hawk circling above without so much as a move of his wings, just floating on the air.

“Next time,” said Lenny, “I ain’t gonna use chicken feathers.”