I have a picture of my father with a fat white chicken. He is poised over the chopping block, with the chicken in one hand and a knife in the other. The year is 1967; he's in Peace Corps training in Hawaii. Behind him is a bamboo hut and the usual backdrop of tropical trees. The main attraction of the picture, though, is my father, Richard. Everybody called him Dick, except his parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts (he had a slew of them) who called him Dickie.

You wouldn't think to call him Dickie looking at the picture. He means business. The chicken is about to be more or less expertly slaughtered. My father, for his part, has a slight grin on his face. He's enjoying this. He's wearing an ordinary short-sleeved shirt buttoned down in the front, shorts and sandals. He gives the impression that this is what all chicken farmers of any merit have been wearing since the animal was domesticated.

Years later, visiting a chicken farmer and close friend of his in Atkinson, New Hampshire, he started a long argument about the best way to kill a chicken. The various benefits of slicing the jugular or breaking the neck were discussed. The men were not beyond going out to the barn and proving the superiority of their methods on actual chickens. This plan was halted abruptly by their respective wives, both of them extremely level-headed and clear-thinking women. The women were no strangers to killing chickens themselves. That particular evening, however, dinner was on the table, the children were gathering round to say grace; it was not the appropriate time for the fathers to bloody themselves killing chickens.

Peace Corps service lasted two years, and when he returned, a married man, in 1969, his life took the more conventional Ivy League routes. He received his Ph.D. from Dartmouth, then taught Psychology at James Madison College in Virginia and Chinese University in Hong Kong. In 1978, my whole family moved to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where he found a job in business, making what I understood to be fairly good money. He was never really happy, though, in the business world, nor when he found a new job teaching at the University of New Hampshire. I think his unhappiness came down to working with too many intelligent people, none of whom knew how to kill a chicken. I have another photograph where he's butchering a pig.

Personally, I am not very comfortable around chickens or pigs. I grew up in a residential neighborhood where people did not keep livestock in their back yards. Many people my father grew up around, including his grandfather, had a small chicken coop, usually right next to the vegetable garden. I was not raised to kill chickens, and in the company of the older generations of my family, this marks me out of place. It is a humbling lack of knowledge for which my comprehensive formal education cannot compensate. The information is not for sale by any of the prominent colleges of the East. Yet I should like to learn how to kill a chicken.