A water drain beneath their street was enough to draw grandchildren Holland, Linus and Thatcher in for a spelunking adventure. Nets and cups. Check. Rain galoshes. Check. Those corrugated steel pipes might contain toad or salamander trophies, or perhaps a scrap of unknown substance. My guess would be kryptonite.
When we are young, everything is new and undiscovered, so there is wonderment in everything. As we age, we can become criminally hardened to wonderment, to the “oddness” of things since we have seen it all before.
Last week, while taking a shower, an odd juxtaposition occurred. I draped my fresh clothes over hooks and unceremoniously dropped my old, soiled clothes in a pile on the floor.
Stepping into the shower, I closed the curtain behind me. With preliminary preparations completed, there was no turning back when I heard, and then spied, an enormous blue bottle house fly. I was imprisoned with this beast, cordoned off from the world, within the confines of fiberglass wall and shower curtain.
Shortly, I recognized that the fly’s incessant dive-bombing of my normally-inaccessible body parts could not go on. Defenseless, with reaction time inadequate to squash him and with no flyswatter in sight, I sought a means to destroy him.
We are blessed with an extremely efficient hot water tank, and doubly blessed to possess a shower head with a hand wand. Standing well back, shower wand in hand, I cranked the water knob all the way to the left–to scorch mode.
Briefly, the fly’s buzz escalated to the wail of a tiny ambulance siren, as the fly frantically sought an escape route. The wail was quickly extinguished when the scalding water fried the pest’s innards.
I wondered over the power and authority I possessed to end this pest’s life, a life so annoying yet wondrous in its creation. It lay, limp and tiny in the shower stall, a miraculous trophy of art and engineering. I felt both powerful and humbled.
There it went, down the drain, down the sewer. Perhaps my grandchildren will soon find their own creation trophy in a sewer drain beneath a road, fish it out with their net, and share in its wonder.