Floyd

Floyd is the judge for the State Fair guinea hen competition. In some circles he is known the world round for his ability to choose the hen which, during the award ceremony, everyone feels was the right choice.

After Deanneanddeandeandeanne Left the Village and Live Kind of Alone in the Woods, Floyd was mayor of the village for some time. At first he was really terrible at the job, but as years passed and everyone settled in to the way he thought everything should be arranged, he was quite effective.

Early Floyd

Morgan asks Floyd, "All those hens look identical to me, how in the world do you choose a winner?"

Floyd reaches back to his bookshelf and took down "Guide to North American Competitive Guinea Hen Breeding and Husbandry, fifth edition", and launches into a lengthy well organized introduction to the topic. He ranges effortlessly through the details of criteria for feather texture, coloring, proportions and finally the complex rules for strutting style.

"How in the world do you keep all that in your head?" asks Morgan, incredulous.

Floyd looks back in confusion and dismay. For him, all the details formed an ornate cathedral, each part in harmony with all others, there weren't hundreds of details to remember, only one single array of harmonious pattern. On top of that, the knowledge, for Floyd, is a matter of survival. There is no alternative. He has to know.

Late Floyd

Many years later, Morgan and Floyd are sipping tea in his study, when Morgan says, "Floyd, your bookshelf is looking empty, what happened to the Guide?"

Floyd looks wistfully at the bookshelf, and slowly turns back. After a lengthy pause, he says, "it still seems impossible, but I've grown past the Guide. Now when I'm there in front of all the world of Guinea breeders and fans, confronted by a line of hopeful birds, I look for the ways in which the birds differ from each other, and imagine shuffling the line in various orders: small on the left and big on the right, more brown on the right and more creamy on the left, perky on the left and stately on the right. After some time of doing this, I wonder which single way of ordering the birds corresponds to the maximum number of those single variable orderings. The combinatorics of the question are clearly too much for my little brain to handle, I have never arrived at an answer to that question which I know satisfies the statistics, but I wonder about it for a while. After some time, I can feel the shuffling and reshuffling fading away in the back of my mind, and I scan the line once more and choose the bird that makes my heart feel warm."

Floyd's eyes lose focus for a good minute. He continues, "It all started shifting after I was spending so much time with Bagni. When I shared with him all my anxiety around choosing the right bird, he kept asking me over and over, 'how do you feel about each individual?' For a while my answers centered around anxiety and hope, which were actually feelings around how my performance would go over. Bagni helped me to change my focus by shifting my values onto what were my own feelings for the birds themselves, and finally I reconnected with my original attraction to the hens and brought that together with the fine discernment I've learned in my life. Judging is fun now!"