Bugs could be one of those species that helped to define summer activity for kids. Mom throws you out because she doesn’t want you in the kitchen picking a finger full of mashed potatoes… So what do you do? Go outside and find a bug to torture. And, I recall doing just that.
Potato Bugs. You know those little things that could roll up into a ball? Lots of entertainment to be found there. Of course torture was always more fun if I could find someone to do it with me… We’d poke those little things just to watch them haul in their gut and legs. Then we’d roll them around the sidewalk with a little twig. Never mind that it might have been torture to the bug. Heck, we were having fun at his expense.
Ants. Lots of fun found there too! I was my own horror movie.
With an anthill, I could drop rocks onto it until the inside of the anthill was exposed… Then take a stick and drive it into the center of the hill.
Moths. Not really a bug but to me, (a small, destructive little person looking for some way to avoid boredom), I could find much entertainment in the destruction of moths. My mother had this lamp that if my brother and I inverted the lampshade, it would draw the moth into the light bulb where he would be caught and fried. I recall such happiness at seeing the smoke rise form the center of the inverted shade. What did I gain from this activity other than a source of shear fascination?
I would have to say that torturing bugs is not a generational thing that only my friends and I did. My father did it as a kid, as did his father. And the bros? Oh yes. They took it to a new level with the ants.
It all started out as a simple event. But bombing the home of thousands of ants was not enough. When the queen had been exposed one of my sons, who shall remain nameless, decided it would be good to take a magnifying glass outside, place it over the queen ant as the glass was pointed toward the sun, and fry her. While this act in and of itself, was ghoulish enough, their delight in watching her majesty and her minions fizzle in the heat was a thing of pain for their mother! (Where did I go wrong? Do they need psychiatric help? Maybe I should teach one less day a week so we can go to the park more often.)
Then comes payback. I’d have thought that I was being un-righteously injured, but then I participated in my youth. I harmed God’s littlest creatures. So payback, and the revenge was truly “a dish served cold (LaClos).
It was the first apartment Hubby and I had in Colorado together… pre-kids. A basement apartment. Every morning these little black ants would pay us a visit. They’d invade the floor space, the cupboards, the kitchen windowsill and the walls. Every morning. We did everything we could think of to get rid of them. But no, they stayed. In fact, I’m sure I saw the queen laying eggs in the flour bin! Even that was clearly not enough, I’m sure. At some point the black ants had a meeting and sent out an SOS to the field mice, and they also invaded our kitchen. Tough little buggers! None of them wanted to leave. So we did. We moved to another apartment where there was a small reprieve.
A few years later as we became comfortable with our first (three) children in a new home in the suburbs of San Diego, the ants came back. This time it was not only an invasion of the pantry and kitchen, but also the bookcase (and wall of books) in the next room. I hired an exterminator, who did his job but not before our little friends had a meeting with the local mafia… snakes. “If we should die, defend our honor and take her out.”
Enter the snakes. Somehow related since the definition of a bug is “a creeping crawling invertebrate.” (Thank you Webster.) Snakes were in the garage. They came into the house! The bathroom. The hallway. The kitchen… But the worst was in the family room. I had just finished my chores for the morning and I lay down on the carpet in front of the fireplace to rest. Relaxed. Peaceful. I rolled over onto my stomach only to see staring me in the face, a snake! It came slithering out from between the bricks of the fireplace with its little tongue darting in and out as it eyed me. Indiana Jones, I concur… “Snakes. I hate snakes.”
Well, I was really having second thought about little creatures at this point. I mean they deserve to live. But just not in the space that I’ve occupied, right?
One more encounter. A neighbor had a baby rattler in her garage. I watched across the driveway as she and her son with two friends observed, all trying to decide who would kill it. Finally they looked over at me… “Carolyn, could you come over here?” And the way they said it, I was thinking, “This can’t be good.” My neighbor extended a flat-head shovel my direction. “Would you kill this thing? Cut its head off.” Well I had had two or three king snakes in the house the month prior, and her son had helped get rid of at least one of them. Could I say no? This was a rattler… not a king snake. This was even worse than a just a rattler because this was a baby that hadn’t released any of its venom. A bite from her would be pretty lethal.
Sigh. “Yeah, I can do it.” As those words flew out of my mouth, my arms went up and the shovel landed firmly behind the head of the snake. I severed its head from the body.
Now, I’ve seen my dad kill an animal for food with a 22 rifle. That isn’t the same as this. To kill with this shovel, meant to feel the blow, to feel the animal die. There is ownership in this. It ripples up your arms as you strike the blow. It’s personal, and memorable in a way that I found shockingly strident to the soul.
“Thou shalt not kill,” to a child means nothing. Because we don’t kill anything as children, do we? We just play. Do in bugs. Take their lives yes, but just do in bugs. Is this what those two young boys thought as they rampantly went about taking life in the Columbine Massacre?
I realize that’s a big stretch. Yet, the way those two went about it was not a lot different than the way children (for generations) have killed time by slaughtering bugs. I’m wondering now if when I was doing in my boredom, I had any thought at all in my head. Boredom breeds stupidity. I don’t ever want to be that bored again. That said? If a rattler crawls up on my patio and threatens my space, he will have a very short time in which to exit the property, before I call a professional to remove him. Only one of us can live here. And it’s me.
May your bugs be few and your boredom non-existent.
Best… Carolyn Thomas Temple