american update, part one

I considered it my patriotic duty to kill some trees in order to create the tree-death (printable) version of this post. Also, I said "duty"! Hee-hee!

Or you can click here to read the shorter Cliffs Notes version of the post. Or you can wait and read the shorter Cliffs Notes version tomorrow, when I post it.

Right. I’ve been in the US for a little over six months now. One of the first things I did upon arriving in this country is purchase a cell phone (to those of you living in the UK, this is what you would call a mobile; to everyone else, this tone is what you would call condescending). I also went to Circuit City to buy three house phones. I bought three phones because the Patriot Act has outlawed the purchase of single items. Buying only two of something is a Class B misdemeanor. With a court order signed by two sitting judges, a US citizen can still buy single items, but only in gallon drums. Unless they are buying a single cell phone, which must be no larger than a Pez dispenser.

I have become truly American. I own two cars now. I have gained 140 lbs., largely by listening to everything that the ads on the Food Network tell me.

It’s okay, though, because I have registered for eight weight-loss programs and purchased twelve fitness products, each of which I learned about on a half-hour infomercial fronted by Jessica Simpson. I can’t afford any of these things, so I’ve put them on credit cards. Several lovely TV spokespeople have suggested cool ways to consolidate my debt.

I now vote Republican, because I realize it is sinful not to. I send an embossed Christmas card to the Bushes (Jr and Sr) every year. I realize that we had to invade Iraq because Osama bin Laden attacked us using the frequent flyer miles of Democrats living in Afghanistan. And because I’m in America, I now think Afghanistan is a city in Iraq.

I listen to country-western music. I think Hannah Montana is a funny show. I watch local news and I’m not bothered by headlines like “Robbed by Thieves.”

No, I have to stop there. This was an actual headline on my local news the other night, and it does bother me. I’m forced to wonder what it said before the editors got hold of it:

“’Robbed by Robbers’? What the hell kind of headline is that? Take it back and do it again. Preferably without inhaling varnish beforehand.”

So the copywriters spend an hour at Starbucks and come back with--

“’Robbed by Thieves.’ By thieves. Yes, dammit, yes. You see that? I like it--cuts right to the heart of the story. No fluff or crap. Run it.”

My main problem with the headline, frankly, is that it isn’t news. “Robbed by Thieves.” Well, yes, that is what thieves do. They rob. Thieves who never rob are just law-abiding citizens in ski hats. So how can it be news to say thieves robbed?

No--news would be something like, “Embalmed by Thieves,” or “Smelted by Thieves.” These are activities rarely associated with those who burgle. On the other hand, “Robbed by Buddhist Pilates Instructors” or “Robbed by Ferrets” would make excellent news stories as well.

But I digress.

So let’s see: I bought a house, which was a major undertaking, requiring me to provide our mortgage lenders with a scavenger hunt list full of things, except possibly a major and an undertaker.

I make no claims to be any kind of financial guru, but I now feel qualified to offer the following advice to anyone looking to relocate to the US from overseas. If you are interested in purchasing a home, you might consider...

• not moving to New York, whose housing laws were clearly devised by a real estate attorney trapped inside Cheech and Chong’s VW minibus. I kid you not, in NY State, when you purchase a house, you will be charged $75 in order to pay a gratuity to the person who prepares the title for your home. That’s right - the state is enforcing tip money for its civil servants. They even label it that way on the closing paperwork: “Title preparer’s gratuity.” God bless. Call me pedantic, but if you are FORCED to pay it, then it isn’t TECHNICALLY a gratuity, is it? I’m going to introduce a motion to the New York legislature proposing that that line be reworded, “Title preparer’s mandatority.

• If you must move to New York, under no circumstances should you move to Westchester County, which is the county with the highest property tax in the state. Seriously - the local taxes here cost more than the state taxes do. Which I think means that economists can now complete their geometric proof that New York is bigger on the inside than on the outside.

• Then again, sure, the property taxes here are spine-chillingly high, but at least the actual houses are as expensive as all get out. Whee!

• Naturally, if you’re going to invest thousands and thousands of dollars in a gaping vortex of debt, you’re going to want to time it carefully. I would recommend, for example, NOT attempting to secure a mortgage, say, around the time that the bottom falls out of the sub-prime lending market. As it happens, bottoms falling out of any kind of lending markets--sub-prime or prime or super-prime or even markets which are divisible by several different positive and negative integers beyond themselves and one--basically bottoms of any kind falling in any way out of any sort of lending markets will tend to make lenders, like banks and mortgage brokers and bent-nosed Sicilian gents with names like “Marty Shoes,” a mite anxious. So beware of falling bottoms. Because it’s bad enough that lawyers, banks and New York State will devour your savings like they’re a 3-pound lobster. It will be worse if you have to beg them to tie the bib on in the first place.

• Of course, if you do end up begging, it’s best to have all your paperwork in order. Thus, when making your overseas relocation to the US, it will be best if you haven’t actually spent any time overseas prior to your arrival in America. It turns out that for the last 50 years or so, the US has ceased to believe in the existence of “the rest of the world.” Instead, it believes that the horizon line created by the ocean and the sky is a fixed, tangible barrier into which ships will sail if allowed to go too far, like Jim Carrey did in The Truman Show. If somehow a ship should accidentally break through this barrier, it would find itself in a dark, nebulous world filled with sea serpents and bogeymen. This alleged “Europe” of which so many speak is purely an imaginary Never-Neverland with no more bearing on reality than the Loch Ness Monster or the separation of church and state. The Middle East is a sort of fictional “Albert Square” setting used as the background for the long-running nightly serial drama called “The News.” Some people have been watching this program for so long that they have actually begun to believe that the characters in it are as real as they are.

• The point is that if you have been out of the US for any length of time, when you return, you will find that no record of you as a consumer or wage-earner exists here. You will have no credit record and will thus be incapable of qualifying for a loan of any sort unless you a) construct a credit history for yourself by pasting together every bill, bank balance sheet, credit card report, tax return and pay stub you have received or sent for the last two years (make sure you have all of these handy so you don’t have to make a lot of overseas calls!), or b) convince the financial institutions of the US and the rest of the world to communicate with one another in a spirit of respect and cooperation as peers and equals.

• Oh, and if you DO manage to sort out all the necessary paperwork, neatly line up your internal organs in alphabetical order on a marble slab, pay all the necessary expenses and live through the closing date without stabbing one of the eight people there to sign papers in the neck with a pen, be sure you have more than four days to move in before school starts for your kids and your new job begins in earnest.

In spite of all this, we managed to buy a house. Which we love, by the way, irrespective of my mildly sarcastic tone (okay, maybe less of a tone and more of a sarcastic orchestration). My favorite part of the whole experience was when we finished signing all the paperwork. After the fiscal colonic we had undergone, we stood up with our papers and our lawyer said, “You can keep the pen, you know, as a memento. Because it’s such a big day.” She was, in reality, a very lovely woman who was incredibly helpful. But there was a part of me that wanted to say, “Um, actually, I think the house will probably remind us of buying the house a bit better. Plus, I’m less likely to lose the house by putting it in my shirt pocket and then having it fall out when I lean over to tie my shoes. Plus, it’s kind of a cheap pen.”

more to come...

teller is dead

not only is Teller dead, but so are a lot of trees, which contributed to this (printable) version of the following post

I thought it might be useful to explain a little bit about my relationship with my wife. You know, just in case you were wondering. And I thought I would begin by explaining the death of Teller.

As you will no doubt have already gleaned, I refer to Teller, the mute half of the Penn & Teller magic act. I realize that limiting the man to “the mute half of Penn & Teller” does him a disservice; he has a broad and deep list of extremely impressive credits to his name. One would think that such a disservice would matter more to me, now that he’s allegedly dead. But one would be mistaken.

About a year ago or so, my head decided that Teller had died. Don’t ask me why it decided this; my head just does things like this from time to time. It had come up with an elaborate story in order to fool me: one with lots of colorful detail to make it feel that much truer. My head told me that Teller’s death had been a shocking tragedy. Sitting down to lunch by himself in a restaurant in Los Angeles one day, he had selected a particular fish (the special of the day) as his entrée. At one time, I even knew the kind of fish it was, but it escapes me now. Some kind of unusual white fish, I think, like shad or mooneye. But not shad or mooneye.

In any case, this fish--notorious for its boniness--was nevertheless served whole from the grill. Teller tucked in while reading an esoteric book on magic. At one point, so immersed was he in his reading that he stopped giving his meal the attention it required: he swallowed two particularly pernicious fish bones. They went down badly and lodged in his throat, closing his windpipe. His arms flailed; his eyes bulged. More than usual. Someone nearby attempted the Heimlich maneuver, but the upward thrust only served to embed the bones more firmly. Within minutes, Teller had suffocated.

See what I mean? Pretty vivid for a load of complete rubbish, isn’t it?

The special beauty of the way my head works is that once it comes up with a gem like this, it doesn’t send me out immediately to preach my drivel to random acquaintances. Oh no. It plants little fallacious land mines, then sits back and waits for them to detonate. Which can happen any time.

So I’m hanging around one afternoon in January and my wife says to me, “Oh, I meant to tell you - Yvonne de Carlo died.” One of the reasons I know my wife still loves me is that she still tells me things like this. I know maybe five people in the world who both A) know that Yvonne de Carlo played Lily Munster (and also a couple parts on truly fine episodes of Fantasy Island) and B) care. My wife is one of them. I figure if she didn’t love me, she’d talk to one of the other four people about Yvonne de Carlo and leave me out of the loop. At least, this is what I tell myself. In my darker moments, I consider that she may tell all five of us, and I’m at the end of the list.

Let’s not go there now.

So it’s a grey rainy afternoon in London and my wife says to me, “Yvonne de Carlo died.”

And I reply. “Oh no--really? Jeez. First Teller, now Lily Munster.”

My wife got that look on her face that a person gets when they ask someone for directions to the bank and the someone says, “Flipknot hammock furry jinkle buttress.” It was as though she hadn’t experienced enough confusion in her life to be able to fill her question with the right amount:

“What?”

On some level, I sensed her perplexity, but it didn’t register with me, because I considered what I had said matter-of-fact, normal, and entirely a part of the fabric of reality. “What what?” I replied, unhelpfully.

“What did you say just then?”

“Just when?”

“Just then--before the thing about Lily Munster.”

“Jeez?”

My wife did not slap me for this, which demonstrates the full extent of her capacity for restraint. “No, you said someone else died. Who else died?”

“Oh, yeah. Teller. You know. Teller’s dead.”

My wife searched her deepest recesses frantically for more confusion to offer to me. After all, she had turned to me in her hour of need, presented all her confusion and hoped that I would dismiss it with a soothing clarification. Instead, I had taken the big mess of her confusion and before her very eyes sculpted it into an enormous flummox-shaped bafflement.

Her face scrunched up more and she leaned into me and said (with just a vague hint of desperation to her voice), “What the hell are you talking about?”

For a moment my resolve flickered. For a moment, I questioned what my head had told me. But no--it happened. Of course it did. Mentally, I shrugged off the flicker.

“You know, Teller. He died a little bit ago. The fish bone in the restaurant?”

My wife giggled a nervous giggle. “Teller? From Penn and Teller?”

“Yeah. He choked and died a few weeks ago.” I narrated the event for her - the lunch in LA, the whitefish (hake?), the book on magic, the well-meaning bystander, and Teller’s untimely and tragic end. With each detail, the amusement on my wife’s face expanded, and my resolve withered. I found I couldn’t place my source material for the account - had I read it in the newspaper? Unlikely, as I rarely read the newspaper. Television, then. But would TV news have had that book detail in it? Maybe a friend told me about it? Thing was, I hadn’t spoken with those other four people in a long time...

By the time I finished, my wife could barely contain her hysterics. Not that she especially tried. If I’m honest, I should admit that my rising, burning embarrassment did nothing to quell her laughter, nor did my sheepish mutterings of “Shut up.” Suffice it to say that we deduced, together, that the fatalistic Teller anecdote was merely a fantastic lie that I had concocted for a reason that would remain an indefinite mystery.

In any other marriage, that would have been the end of it. As faithful readers of my work will no doubt have discerned by now, however, my marriage differs somewhat from other marriages.

For the next several weeks, the pseudo-spectre of Teller haunted our conversations. Upon learning of Sidney Sheldon’s passing, I said to my wife, “That reminds me...did you hear that Teller from Penn & Teller died?” Initially, my wife could not be sure if I had forgotten our previous conversation on the matter (she held numerous irrefutable precedents upon which she based this uncertainty). To be fair, at this point I wasn’t sure if she had actually had the conversation about Teller, or if it was just a marvelously complicated memory by head had invented for my aggravation and its own amusement (again, my head does this sort of thing from time to time). The idea being, I can hardly fault my wife for her suspicions.

“Teller isn’t dead. You made that up,” she reminded me.

Anna Nicole Smith’s accidental drug overdose: “Wow. She was even younger than Teller when he died.”

“He’s still alive. Why do you keep saying that?”

Ian Richardson’s surprising demise: “His doctor said he was in good health. I think they said Teller had just had a physical.”

“Teller is not dead!”

Kurt Vonnegut’s death following his head injury while at home: “That is a real shame. One of the great black humorists of our day. Speaking of black humorists--”

“NOT DEAD! STILL COMPLETELY ALIVE! LET. IT. GO!”

As you may have surmised, by now I had taken to offering periodic faux-bituaries just to rankle my betrothed. I’ll own up: seeing her flip out because I said Teller was dead when he wasn’t sent ribbons of childish glee up and down my person. I realize this may mean I’m even more disturbed than my behavior to this point suggests, but I don’t care. I’m not proud of this needling torment, mind you. But, given the chance, it’s probably more than fair to say I’d do it again.

One night, we prepared for bed, and I switched the news on. A report came through stating that Charles Nelson Reilly had died of pneumonia. I made my obligatory connection to Teller. My wife, completing her evening’s ablutions, stepped out of the bathroom in order to issue a roary groan (or a groany roar) and howl, “Why do you keep saying that? He is not dead! What is it with you?”

At this moment, my head suggested I ask a question: “Why does it bother you so much?” I can’t imagine why such an obvious line of inquiry hadn’t occurred to me before.

Clearly my wife hadn’t asked this question before either, and she deflated almost visibly before me, as though she had suddenly and involuntarily re-routed all her irate energy into the part of her brain designed to work out problems. Trying to save face, she converted her fluster into annoyance: “I just don’t think it’s a nice thing to do! The poor guy is out there, still alive somewhere, and you keep telling people he’s dead.”

Not people. Just you.

“Well, so what? You still talk about him like he’s dead. And I just don’t think you should because it’s mean.” By now my wife had worked out that she didn’t have enough fluster to generate an annoyance and would have to settle for a sort of medium-strength petulance.

I pointed out that Teller was a much wealthier man than I am, and that he had a great many distractions in his life which might prevent him from hearing that some nobody living in London had fabricated (albeit somewhat comprehensively) a myth concerning the man’s death and refused to let go of it. Actually, given the sorts of shenanigans Penn and he get up to, part of me thought the myth might actually amuse Teller. Even if he wasn’t, he could always seek revenge by telling people that in fact I had died. And he had access to better information-dispersal systems than I did, so his lie would likely reach further than his widow...wife, that is. In short, while my beloved’s defense of the man was admirable and a little cute, I felt fairly confident Teller himself didn’t suffer a whole lot at my hands.

My wife’s final volley fell far short: “I still think you’re mean.”

In the months that followed, I explored my wife’s sensibilities on this subject: why didn’t I let it go? Was the thrill of getting under my wife’s skin really worth playing with the fate-tempting hand-grenade of another man’s suggested death? Did Teller really mean so little to me that I would use him in this way?

Of course, by the time such musings made their way around my head, I knew the answer: yes, I would tempt fate. Yes, my concern for the man approached non-existent. Yes, I would continue to make jokes at the expense of his failing vital signs.

After all, he was dead to me.

(Snook, maybe?)

refond

So I’ve recently become very involved in and passionate about this new sport. It’s called Refond (emphasis on the first syllable). It was invented by my six-year-old daughter Beatrice. The object of the game is that Beatrice wins, no matter what.

To say that Beatrice has a competitive side is accurate only if she is also described as being shaped like a monogon. A monogon the size of the Great Wall of China. To play any game with her is an exercise in subordination, as she automatically assumes that she will go first. A suggestion to the contrary will require an explanation: this will need to be lengthy, convincing and more than likely slightly threatening. And even when and if she finally succumbs to someone else starting a game, the unspoken understanding is that, should this person win, the win will not carry any real weight in the Beatricentric folds of our household.

Crisis points are reached whenever the tide of a particular game turns against my little one--you know, she’s just rounded the final bend in Candyland and draws the card that sends her back to the Peppermint Forest. In these times of crisis, it’s like having a three-foot Allan Dershowitz next to you. Last night, she argued with me fervently that because I rolled the die when it was her turn, she should be allowed to have the number that came up on the die. Nevermind that the roll brought her right back into contention in a game she was losing. That wasn’t the point. Indeed, the rolling of dice is always subject to legal scrutiny in Beatrice’s world: if the roll comes up unfavorably, you’d better hope it didn’t graze your elbow, because of course that means you got in the way and the roll didn’t count. It’s interference.

When she wins, she is insufferable. When she loses, she is inconsolable. In much the same way that she seems to believe that dessert is the only reason to eat a meal, she likewise believes that winning is the only reason to play a game. Losing is not just unacceptable, it is offensive. Losing causes her entire little world to fall in a shattered heap at her feet. And she is old enough to realize that she’s going to lose a lot, since she’s the youngest in the family and she has the least experience with the various games we play (having said this, she possesses one of the most devastating short-term memories I’ve ever come across and one plays Concentration with her at one’s own risk; my defeats at her hands have rarely been anything but humiliating).

The discovery of Refond has finally provided her with certain security in the world of familial competition. She invented it one Saturday afternoon a few weeks ago when she and I were home alone together.

There is nothing I would like more than to explain the rules to you, but it would be like trying to explain the shape of fog. Here’s what I can tell you: it involves a ball. The playing surface is the floor of our family room. I lean against one wall, in the midst of some oversized pillows and a bunch of stuffed bears who live in the pillows. Beatrice sits opposite me, about ten feet away, squeezed between the legs of one of our dining room chairs. We take turns rolling the ball back and forth across the floor. I think I’m meant to try to get the ball between the legs of the chair, which is of course impossible because the entire space between the legs is filled with child. What Beatrice is meant to do is a delightfully protean mystery. Oh, right--occasionally, at random moments, we shout, “Refond!” Well, I say random. Beatrice insists that there are clear reasons for saying it, and that whenever I say it, it’s always at the wrong time and for the wrong reasons. Which is fair enough.

In spite of my tone, I must state for the record here that I have had more fun playing Refond than I have ever had playing any other game or sport in my life. Honestly. The beauty of it is, you know that you can’t win, so you don’t really have anything at stake. And with such a plastic set of rules, it’s impossible to play well, so there’s no pressure there either. All that’s left is the opportunity to sit and watch the marvelously convoluted imagination of a six-year-old attempt to turn an ordinary setting and a largely unpredictable series of events into a comprehensible victory. Of some sort.

The flights of rationalization and defensive logic involved in this process are beyond absurd - they are outright hysterical. I have never laughed harder at anything in my life. I have laughed until I gasped, until my abdomen burned with the ache, until I cried. And my daughter, herself infected my hysterics, desperately tried to get control of my laughter in hopes that it would allow her to regain control of her game.

Tonight, for instance, when I said I wanted to play, I began by asking Beatrice to confirm for me the fact that no one but her was allowed to win. This she would not do. I can understand this - without the bitter possibility of losing, winning tastes far less sweet. But I pressed this point, because I have always understood it as central to the game, and I wanted to have my understanding confirmed by the game’s creator and mistress. What I failed to appreciate, however, was that attempting to fix this rule in stone broke the second rule of the game: no Refond rule will ever be fixed in stone.

“You can win if you put the ball in the goal [between the legs of the chair].”

“So I just have to do that once, and then I win?”

“No, if you do that, you get a point.”

“How many points do I need to win?”

“225.”

I laughed here, at both her precision and her excess. I couldn’t help myself. She laughed too. I said, “We can’t play until I score 225 goals.”

“Okay, then, we’ll play to 20.”

“That’s still too much.”

“Okay, then, you can get 10 points for a goal.”

“So I only have to score two goals, and then I can win?”

“Yes,” she replied and promptly filled every square inch of the “goal” with her tiny body.

“Right, so like I said, I can’t win, because there is no way I can get this ball into your goal if you’re going to park yourself in front of it like that.”

“But you have two goals you can use.” This sentence delivered with the authoritative air of the experienced professional reading to the young neophyte from the international rulebook.

“Ah. What’s the other one?”

“The other chair.” She points to another, slightly larger chair, about two feet away from the one she’s gripping.

“Okay, so if I score twice in either of these goals, I win?”

“Yes.”

“Fine.” With this clarification of play, I prepare to roll the ball into the unprotected goal. Sensing this, my daughter shrieks and throws her body flat and outstretched on the floor, such that her arms and head block one chair while her legs block the other.

After a few more minutes’ negotiation, we resume play and I manage to score a goal. “Yes! Ten points!” I yell, the smell of victory finally wafting in my direction. I make a bit of a show here, whooping it up and bragging of my accomplishment to my other daughter, seated nearby. Beatrice, meanwhile, insists that I’ve only earned two points. I shout back that she said the goal was worth ten. Our debate escalates, and she senses that my superior volume could win the day. So, when I am momentarily distracted by her sister, Beatrice kicks the ball wildly. It bounces off the coffee table and hits me on the foot.

This move was apparently precisely what she was going for, as evidenced by her reaction: “HAH! YES!! GOAL! 5000 points! BOO-YAH!!!”

Game play is paused here as the phrase “boo-yah” coming out of the face of my child has reduced me, once again, to a giggling mess. The girls follow suit. When, minutes later, Beatrice is finally able to draw enough oxygen into her lungs to speak, she explains (rather haughtily, in my opinion) that if the ball ever hits a player after it bounces off of something, the player who throws it gets 5,000 points.

Again, fair enough. I have no one to blame for my ignorance but myself, after all.

One of my favorite aspects of Refond is that, unlike conventional sport, it does not have a clear endpoint. There are no banal markers like “innings” or “quarters” or “periods” or the like. Instead, each Refond event contents itself with a slow disintegration under the weight of its own complexity. At some point, my attempt to reconcile the various rules that Beatrice has constructed, along with her attempt to keep track of her own contradictions and reversals, will leave us both prone on the floor, psychicly shattered. Sometimes gameplay will be halted by a bathroom break, which walk might itself occasion a glimpse of some distraction more enticing than Refond: mom making lunch or sister fiddling around at some website. Every so often, as different props are introduced as Refond equipment, the props themselves lead the players into other recreation.

In all these instances, the promise of continuing the game remains in the air as heavy as the reality of the game’s conclusion. Some element of Refond, then, permeates all our daily activities; the game goes on for Beatrice even when it isn’t Refond season.

So, now we also play Refond Race to the Top of the School Steps (“You weren’t holding the rail the whole way up! I win!”) and Refond Clear the Breakfast Dishes Best (“Yours didn’t count because you pushed in my chair and I was supposed to do that. I win!”)

Someday, I hope to compile a rulebook for Refond - one that real sports geeks will pore over and memorize in order to engage in legalistic debates with one another, like they do about the designated hitter rule in baseball and the offside rule in European football. I’d love for there to be a National Refond League: a whole bunch of people who get together and compete in the sport and know that, no matter what happens in the end, Beatrice wins.

Even if she isn’t there.

wagon training

(for those keeping score, this article originally appeared in Accents, the magazine of the American School in London, except this time I changed some names; originally, this article was published in a tree-death [printed] version - by clicking here, you can have the authentic wagon training experience)

When I was a kid, my family had a big wood-panelled station wagon that we’d use for our annual three-day drive from Albany, New York to various parts of Florida. For us kids, our progress in life was measured by the seat we earned in the station wagon. Least desirable was sitting on “the Hump,” that section in the middle of the back seat just behind the gear box. Typically, my parents relegated my younger sister to this position and offered the positive spin that in the event of an accident, my brother and I would protect her by absorbing any side impact and resultant bodily damage. Most desirable, of course, was “the Way-Back,” that seatbelt-free zone in the back where the luggage was kept and where an especially height-deprived child could stretch out on a long trip.

Over the eighteen years I’ve spent in education, I’ve learned that to a great degree, progress as a teacher comes from riding the Frustration Wagon. This could probably be said of any job: lawyer, welder, professional wrestler. But all of my working life has been spent in schools, so I only know the Scholastic Wagon of Frustration.

I remember clearly when I, as a teacher, first climbed on board: sitting in my tiny apartment on Massachusetts Avenue, eating Kraft macaroni and cheese, waiting for my Dungeons & Dragons computer game (probably Eye of the Beholder from the Forgotten Realms series) to load up. The phone rang.

“Mr. McColl? This is Mrs. Parkinson. Sean’s mother? Do you mind if we talk for a few minutes?”

I didn’t if we did, and after some preliminary interrogative parrying we arrived at the thrust of her particular line of inquiry:

“So Mr. McColl, what should we be doing at home for Sean as parents?”

Yep. Twenty-one years old, first-year teacher, fresh out of college, being asked what sounded an awful lot like a parenting question. Had she wanted to know about preparing ramen noodles or defeating a small force of drow elves with your cleric injured, I could have been her guy. Sadly, I had decidedly fewer suggestions for constructive interaction between teens and their parents.

Anyway, surely Mrs. Parkinson knew better than I did? Surely. My involuntary honesty response wanted very badly to kick in, and it was all I could do to keep from blurting out a litany of my unworthiness: that I balanced my checkbook by crossing out the number I had written in and replacing it with the one that the bank sent to me each month, that I had begun the irresponsible accumulation of credit card debt, that until only a few months ago I had been known to attend fraternity parties and that I had declined to participate in my school’s retirement program because it seemed like a waste of money that could be better spent on stereo components and book clubs.

The situation frustrated me. My knee-jerk frustration stemmed from the fact that my mac and cheese had begun to congeal and that Colm, Fingers and the rest were waiting for me to take them into the town of Myth Drannor. But I later recognized this was just pettiness. At that point, I decided I was frustrated because nobody had ever told me I’d have to advise parents when I started teaching. But that was rubbish as well: the truth was I was frustrated by my own ignorance. I didn’t have an answer for Mrs Parkinson, simple as that.

Now ensconced on the Hump of the Frustration Wagon, I needed to find some way to make myself more comfortable. I needed the answers for all the future Mrs Parkinsons I would encounter. But where to find them? Faced with this dilemma, I asked myself the question I always ask in times of crisis: what would Columbo do?

Columbo regularly enters situations about which he knows nothing, and regularly has to find answers to difficult questions. His primary tool? Attention to detail.

So I tried attending to more details. I noticed Sam’s exquisite turn of phrase in his Crucible essay, wherein he described John Proctor as being “mercenary beneath his sanctimonious veneer” (since then, I have been known to employ this phrase in conversation from time to time). I revelled in John’s marvellously succinct retelling of the critical moment in Crichton’s Andromeda Strain: “Dr. Burton’s greatest mistake came when he failed to autopsy the anticoagulated rats.” When Percy faced ridicule after being defeated by a girl in a wrestling match, I spent time picking the experience apart with him and using it as the basis for a chapel talk. And I shared with Willis’ parents the moment when he, meek and quiet as ever, walked into the Grade 4 classroom to whoops and applause after his celebrated portrayal as Shaggy from Scooby-Doo in the Lower School lampoon. I also noticed grammatical errors in compositions, inaccuracies in recounting literature, spelling mistakes, and more. And slowly, I learned about my students and about students in general, and I found myself able to intelligently talk to parents about what they might do with their children at home.

At the time, I taught eighth-grade English, including grammar. And it must be said, I was the grammar sensei. Grammar-Wan Kenobi. MC Grammar. Grammar Moses.

Once a year, I’d give a test on the parts of speech. One section of the test involved students reading sentences and deciding the function of the italicized nouns or pronouns. One sentence I was particularly fond of using was,

“I will write you soon.”

No doubt you recognized this as the one example in English usage of the employment of an indirect object (you) without a corresponding direct object (a letter, implied). Well, despite my extraordinary teaching skills and unmatched Rasputin-like charisma, each year a head-achingly large number of my students would raise their hands to ask,

“Mr. McColl, is there a word missing from Question 17?”

Not only would someone ask this during the test, but minutes later someone else (a slower worker) would ask it again. And then third and fourth students would ask it further along. The more discrete students would walk tentatively up to my desk to ask me in whispers.

Eventually, I had enough. One year, I rewrote the test to include this line in the directions:

“And no, there is not a word missing from Question 17.”

Yes, in bold.

Administering the test to my third-period English students, I had them all focus intently upon me before looking at their tests, and I ordered them, deeply, deliberately and ominously, “DO NOT BEGIN THE TEST UNTIL YOU HAVE READ ALL THE DIRECTIONS.” I made them recite this instruction back to me.

Nevertheless, about twenty minutes in, Mike Van Buskirk raised his hand. “Mike,” I said, “did you read the directions?”

“Yes,” he answered hurriedly. “In number--”

“Mike,” I said, “I don’t think you’ve read the directions.”

“Yeah, I did. But in number--”

“Mike, I want you to read the directions again. Right now. Every word. Beginning to end. And if you still have a question, I will answer it.”

And I watched Mike put his head down and begin scanning the instructions. When he reached my instruction about Number 17, I saw a convulsive shiver rattle his body from head to foot. Following this, he began to giggle - not a happy giggle, but rather the giggle of a man who has just crept up to the edge of hysteria and is wondering whether he should jump in.

This incident set me to thinking: did Mike’s manic response really mean he had learned a lesson about following directions, or did I simply solidify his belief in the paranormal? I hadn’t become a teacher for the cosmetic responses of students on tests or their temporary performances in class presentations: I wanted to know that my teaching had fundamentally changed my students. I wanted to know that my teaching had affected who they were and how they viewed the world. And I felt in my bones that if I could work out a way to know these things, I’d successfully climb into the Window Seat of the Frustration Wagon.

Eighteen months passed before I had my shot. Working in an all-boys school, I had grown accustomed to the testosterone-fuelled resistance I faced on any occasion during which I asked the boys to explore their “softer” emotions or their “feminine sides.” They merely tolerated our discussions of masculine love and friendship in Becket. No one signed up for my after-school knitting activity.

And so it was one spring that I found myself attempting to subvert their very traditional readings of Lord of the Flies. Homecoming Day had arrived, and all of my students understood the necessity of humoring their teachers as they awaited the day’s main event: the annual lacrosse grudge match against our greatest rivals.

Golding entitled Chapter Four of his novel, “Painted Faces and Long Hair.” Seeking to provoke my students, I asked them why they thought he might have done so.

Their bored response: “It’s when the kids paint their faces to look like savages, and they’ve been on the island for a while so their hair is getting really long.”

Yes, but why focus on those two details? Why not call the chapter, “Dirty, Smelly and Running Around in Their Underwear,” all of which are other descriptive details that arise in the chapter?

Their answers were safe and predictable and discussed the characters’ primitive behaviour, the symbolism of color in the book, and so on. I asked them what sort of people, typically, have long hair and paint their faces. After several minutes of blank stares and leading questions, someone tentatively whispered, “Girls?”

My next suggestion, that Golding wants to show that only when isolated from the conventional role-playing of society can boys truly explore all aspects of their identity – even and perhaps especially their feminine side – met with derisive laughter and aggressive disbelief. Undaunted in my quest to build my fortress of literary interpretation, I pointed out other examples of male-female roles played out on the island. I saw their defenses crumbling: they couldn’t argue with the evidence.

But they could distance themselves from it: “Anyway, Mr McColl, this is a stupid story. This wouldn’t really happen.”

How could they say that? They couldn’t know how they’d behave if they were left on an island away from adults.

Now came the challenge: “So you’re saying you think if we were left on an island for a couple months, we’d take off our clothes, paint our faces, roast a pig over a fire and dance around it chanting, ‘KILL THE PIG. SPILL ITS BLOOD’?”

Well, when you put it that way, I suppose I couldn’t say that exactly, no…

Later that afternoon, I tidied up my classroom as the bell rang for the end of the school day. My classroom windows looked down onto the school courtyard, and I could see mobs of fanatic boys spilling into the open space. It was a beautiful warm sunny day, and the high-school boys coordinated the local fan base. Many of the students, already overheated from minutes of screaming and running around, stood shirtlessly about, awaiting their turn at the stations where older boys would apply blue and white face paint. Other upperclassmen enlisted the help of younger boys in the construction of a bonfire inside a stone wall specially created for the purpose. Atop the pyre a bear (mascot of the rival team) was placed.

Moments later I watched as they ignited the fire, cheered the burning bear and danced, half-naked and repeating, “KILL THE BEARS! KILL THE BEARS!”

I gaped, desperate to use the moment somehow but ultimately powerless.

Just then, from a distant door on the far side of the courtyard, Joe, one of my students, emerged. He already had his face painted half blue, half white. He carried a lacrosse stick. Seeing me in my open window, he smiled and waved, and I waved back. Joe then blitzed forward to join the frenzied mob.

And then he stopped. And he looked at the frenzied mob, as though with new eyes.

And then he looked at me. And then at the mob again.

Eventually, sheepishly, he wandered over to join the rest of the boys, but it was clear that his heart was no longer in it.

There it was: something I’d taught in class had affected the behavior of a student and his outlook on the world. I felt that this warranted my moving into a Window Seat.

The trouble was, I immediately found myself facing the next level of professional frustration: fine, my teaching affected Joe one afternoon. But did it really become a part of him? Would it last?

In other words, the Window Seat wasn’t good enough. I had my eye on the Way-Back.

I spent another four years desperately trying to climb over that back seat. I taught different grades and different subjects in different schools to different students. I used progressive assessment strategies; I trialed new cooperative learning techniques; I experimented with variable grading practices. I paid all kinds of attention to all kinds of things.

Bupkus. Window Seat City.

Eventually, I left the classroom to try riding the Administrative Wagon of Frustration for a while. I spent idle moments running through the names of colleagues who had probably found their way into the Way-Back of Teaching; I even met a few who I imagined rode in the coveted position of Shotgun. Always I wanted to corner them and demand to know their secrets. But, as Columbo teaches us, no one can give us the answers to the questions of our own lives. We must find our own answers in our own way.

A few days ago I bumped into a student I’d taught in Grade 7 who was heading into his final semester of college. We decided to go out for a beer to catch up. Our conversation veered wildly: Alfred Hitchcock, Plato’s Symposium, the Simpsons, the American School in London, getting a job, the other students in my Grade 7 homeroom.

“I remember when you told us about yourself on the first day,” Francis said. “You said you had a tendency to go off on tangents.”

How very matter-of-fact of me.

“Yeah. None of us knew what a tangent was. So you drew a picture on the board of a circle with a line coming out of it at the edge.” His finger traced the diagram on the pub table. “That’s still how I remember what a tangent is whenever it comes up in a math class or a conversation or whatever.”

You’d think it would have been anti-climactic to find myself in the Way-Back after I’d stopped teaching. But you’d be wrong. In fact, even now I’m trying to work out a way to call Shotgun.

insect asides

as a politically independent website, we now present this essay in Republican (PDF) and Democrat (Microsoft Reader) versions

Before I get started, I just want to state for the record that yes, I realize spiders aren't insects. I know this. So please don't come up to me and tell me that actually, spiders aren't insects. Because I know this, and all you will accomplish by telling me is you will ruin my fun slightly and you will make me like you less. And why would you want to do that?

I suppose it started with my wife's message to me yesterday. Having said that, it might just as easily have started with me standing shirtlessly in the kitchen this morning. But my wife did call me at work yesterday and leave a message for me, and it went something like this:

"Hi, it's me. I don't have an actual reason to call. I just wanted to see how your day was going. Oh, and I wanted to tell you about my bee encounter today. So if you get a chance, call me back so I can tell you about the bee."

I love these kinds of messages from my wife. There used to be more of them. Had I been a more attentive husband, I would have chronicled them over the years, watching them grow in narrative strength and forethought, from:

"Hi, it's me. I was just calling to see how things are going and because I'm bored. And also I have a story to tell you about this weird straw I got at Starbuck's today that had this huge mutant bubble bulge in the middle, like it was growing a bubo or something. It was totally bizarre. (thoughtful pause here) Actually, I guess there really isn't a story so much as just the fact that I found the straw. Which I told you about now, so you don't have to ask me about it. Unless you want me to tell you again. Yeah. (another, somewhat less thoughtful pause here) Okay, well I suppose you can call if you want. Whatever. I don't care. See ya."

The bee message tickled me, and not just because it demonstrated that at last my wife has come to master the writer's trick known as the "reveal." Even fifteen years into our marriage, I love that my wife wants to share the Seinfeldian minutia of her day. It’s critical for us to have regular separate experiences, because with our having been together so long, our communication skills border on the telepathic. We have conversations that go like this:

Me (on seeing an ad for a program featuring American master carpenter Norm Abrams): It strikes me that he is--

My Wife: --the carpentry equivalent of the big hair guy from the painting shows. Yeah, I know.

In this, she has not only anticipated what I was going to say, she has stated it precisely the way I intended.

Friends of our who have witnessed such moments experience everything from marvel to stunned bewilderment to alarm, and once upon a time, we did the same. But after fifteen years of marriage, the element of wonder has faded. Now when she steals my moment, especially if I’m about to say something clever and funny and devastatingly insightful, she just pisses me off. I know I do the same thing to her, but she’s more irritating when she does it. Trust me on this.

Anyway, knowing she had an encounter I couldn't possibly anticipate filled me with glee. That she felt inspired to call and tell me about it made my heart leap. I knew that, if my latent insecurities were right and she had been having an affair since she last left me one of these messages, it was now over. She loved me again.

Later, she told me the bee story, which went something like this:

She was standing in our family room watching the end of a tennis match, when she heard a loud humming sound coming from somewhere. At first she thought it was the sound of motorized gardening equipment outside (it was a hot day and she had the terrace door open). Surveying the room, however, she noticed a large, furry bumblebee hovering up around our skylight and banging into it in an attempt to punch through the glass and get out. As my wife tells the story, this bumblebee was roughly the size of a grapefruit, give or take.

The skylight is in a vaulted ceiling, so there wasn't much she could do at that moment. On the plus side, as the bumblebee stupidly and relentlessly bounced around the skylight, it covered itself with all those hard-to-reach cobwebs that had collected up there. I have to imagine that it buzzed louder at this, because what’s more annoying than walking through a spiderweb and getting it all over yourself? I’m sure the fact that bees don’t have hands to remove sticky spiderwebs from themselves did not help the bee feel better about the situation.

My wife went into other parts of the flat to do some chores. When she came back later, the bee had moved further down one of the ceiling's supporting beams. Now, with the aid of a small stepladder and a long hooked pole we use for opening other skylights, my wife could reach it. The ladder gave her the altitude she needed to get to the bee. The pole gave her the reach she needed in order to avoid even the slightest chance of physical contact with the bee. A simple plan, but a workable one.

A humanitarian in most things, my wife attempted to coax the bee onto the end of the pole in order to gently carry it to an open window and freedom. Not surprisingly, the fat bee did not see the business end of a hooked pole (no doubt multiplied dozens of times over through its compound lenses) as a humanitarian outreach effort. It became agitated. Eventually, it flew out away from the wall and toward my wife.

At this point, my wife realized an important flaw in her plan: should the bee fly directly at her, standing at the top of a stepladder would prevent her from running away. So she was left to simply stand, trying to work out how to use a skinny aluminum pole to shield her from the strafe of an antagonized flying monster.

In a fabulous anticlimax, the bee swerved and flew out the terrace door.

My wife shared this story with me in the evening when I returned home from work, and I, caring and grateful husband that I am, found it harrowing and humorous at all the right moments. And I didn't predict any of her lines.

The next morning I awoke as usual to get dressed for work and to prepare breakfast for our two children before they went to school. For reasons unimportant to mention here, the combination of dressing and breakfast-making placed me, at one point, simultaneously in our kitchen and without a shirt.

As I poured myself a glass of orange juice, I felt something flutter down from my head and onto my belly. Under different circumstances, I might have thought it was a hair ejecting itself and gently tickling me as gravity lulled it to the floor. However, these different circumstances would have involved me being a person with hair that A) was longer and B) grew out of some kind of ejector follicles.

A glance down at my navel revealed a spider, which, as I watched, crawled unashamedly toward my most personal space. It was a brown spider with maybe a three-inch legspan. For the splittest of seconds I felt like Sean Connery must have felt in that one Bond movie--I think it's Doctor No--where the bad guys sneak into his room during the night and put a tarantula on his bed. What makes me a better person than Sean Connery, apart from my lack of misogyny, is the fact that unlike Mr. Bond, I did not pulverize the offending creepy-crawly with the nearest footwear. Like my wife, I am a humanitarian.

(Another point: I am aware that not killing spiders doesn’t really make me or my wife a humanitarian. I realize there is probably a better word to use, but I can’t think of what it is, and anyway, “humanitarian” sounds good here. You may very well know what the better word is, but I don’t care, and anyway, you should be paying attention to the story, for crying out loud.)

No, I did not kill it, this spider the size of a small mouse, this spider exploring me so intimately. Instead, I emitted a girlish, "GAH!", and shuddered spastically and pelvically until the spider hung from my groin by its own webbing, making me look like some sort of curiosity in a Soho museum or gag gift model in a sex catalog. With two fingers I disconnected the web and let the spider fall to the floor, where I covered it with a glass. The incident concluded with one final series of shivers and my releasing a noise like "bluh-blallallall."

Slipping a coaster under the spider glass, I prepared to toss it out the window. Before doing so, however, I carried the specimen from room to room to make sure my recent exploit was fully fathomed by my the fairer-sexed members of my family.

My daughters, who love me, gasped at the size of the beast. Though she did not say it, I could tell that my older daughter was happy to be sitting on the far side of the dining room table in order that, should the spider escape, she might tip the table onto its side to be used as protective cover. My younger daughter looked at me, appropriately I felt, as one might look at a man who had wrestled a grizzly or carefully extricated his leg from the jaws of a killer shark. And she summed up the feelings of us all when she uttered her simple, "Oh my God."

My sense of my own heroism now affirmed, I proceeded to the girls' bathroom to present my prize to my wife. Already bored when she opened the door, my so-called better half took one look at the spider and uttered an unimpressed, "Oh. A daddy long-legs."

She was, of course, wrong. I believe deliberately so, and I see this as proof that my wife does not love me. This and the affair she has been having.

I know what a daddy long-legs looks like. It looks exactly like a smaller version of the ship in which Dr. Sin used to tool around in the old Johnny Quest cartoons: spherical body with no apparent ornamentation and six gangly, impossibly thin legs of identical length. Come to think of it, in my adult life Jim Carrey has always, for some reason, reminded me of a daddy long-legs.

The spider I captured looked nothing like this. It had the bulbous butt section that so many spiders have, with a tinier round bit on the front where venomous fangs are connected in the larger models. There were three pairs of legs, each a different length from the others, so that it moved a bit like a dragster. And the legs were thin, but not impossibly thin. If a daddy long-legs is Kate Moss, then my spider was more of a Kiera Knightley.

My wife is many things: mother, humanitarian, likely adulteress. But she is no entomologist. I know this because, as you will undoubtedly have discerned from my descriptions above, I am. That is, I'm as close to one as a person can be without spending a lot of time around bugs or reading anything about them. And it is with that authority that I can say in no uncertain terms that, when my wife called the thing in the glass a daddy long-legs, she didn't know what the hell she was talking about.

Before you go getting all judgmental on her ass, I should explain that my wife's ignorant outburst was a result of her illness, a kind of pronounced Sympathy Deficit Disorder (SDD), as a result of which, she is incapable of generating any feelings of sorrow for the plights of her husband. My formal investigation of this condition began several months ago, when I bent over in our bathroom to reach something on a low shelf. When I stood up, I cracked my head on the corner of our bathroom counter. It was exceeding painful. I believe I still carry the scar. I believe I will always carry this scar.

As one does under such circumstances, I used vocabulary which made me hope my children were far away or at least not nearly as impressionable as they seem. I then stumbled out of the bathroom to seek solace in the arms of my loving spouse.

I found her in the kitchen. She turned, saw my hemorrhaging skull, and her face softened. "What happened?"

"I whacked my head viciously on the counter in our bathroom."

All facial softness disappeared immediately. "Oh. Well, that was stupid."

Yes. I stood before her, painfully concussed and bleeding from the scalp, and she chose literally to add insult to my injury. The gentleman in me wanted to phone up the man with whom she conducted her affair and make sure he understood just what sort of woman she was, in case he wanted to start shopping around for someone new.

But I didn’t phone him. I complained about her behavior, of course, but ultimately, in my heart of hearts, beneath layers of self-esteem and denial and also I suppose beneath the layers of other hearts that my heart of hearts lies at the heart of, I knew that I deserved it. My sympathy-free marriage, like the spider on my midsection, came as karmic retribution.

When I was a sophomore in college, I took a course called The Artist’s Journal, a humanities course exploring the ways painters, poets, and authors have of expressing themselves in their personal diaries. As part of the course, we not only read these diaries, we were expected to maintain our own journals. Occasionally, our professor asked us to share excerpts from our journals with the class.

I will forever remember this class if for no other reason than the three words with which I was introduced to it. Running late on the day of the first class, I made my way through the submarine tunnels in the basement of the university building, trying to puzzle out the stochastic sequence used to number the rooms. By the time I came to the door I needed, I had forgotten if in fact the number on it was the right number. Thus it was that I had my face buried in my course guide when I opened the door and stepped inside to hear those three words:

“Oh. A male.”

Never before, and rarely since, have I been summarized so succinctly and accurately. Well, I say accurately—I suppose that depends on whom you ask. I own both a Y-chromosome and occasional facial hair. My wife would point out that I knit better than she does, know less about professional sports than she does, and enjoy figure skating as much as she does. But she only says these things to hurt me.

Looks of stark disappointment fell over the faces of my eighteen female classmates the way I always imagined those plastic masks fall in depressurized airplane cabins. I don’t know how long the women there had entertained the notion that theirs might be an academic boy-free zone, but clearly they all had. In the years since the course ended, I have on occasion allowed my mind to speculate as to what sorts of secret female activities they might have tentatively scheduled for the semester. Perhaps the upper-classwomen would use one class to share the spell that caused male-pattern baldness in the men who broke up with them badly. Other classes might have been earmarked for arm-wrestling and farting. They might have planned times to play with Legos, write naughty limericks, and try out recipes for all those mixed drinks you always hear about but no one ever orders, like Mai Tais or Zombies. Before I arrived, they would have made plans to exchange secret woman handshakes, share secret woman code words, pass along secret woman intelligence. All the plans would have been joyous, exhilarating and fun in a way that was not possible in the stifling presence of maleness. In those scant few moments after the professor took attendance, a staggering supply of expectation and hope and anticipation would have accumulated.

Then I entered, and effectively peed on the territory they had been decorating with the throw pillows and chintz curtains of their plans. Now class would be just class. And it was my fault.

So they resented me a trifle. Fortunately, they reserved their bile only for those times when I actually attended class. Particularly harsh were the readings of my journal entries, which often began with a pedestrian observation (“He has a very self-conscious voice in his journal”) but invariably veered into psychological profiling (“It’s as though in his awareness of his reader, he’s trying to write what he thinks we want to read, rather than using his journal to explore his true self. We don’t really see how he truly feels. Which suggests he has intimacy issues.”).

One cold November day, I found myself in The Artist’s Journal class seated behind an athletic blond wearing a knitted sweater with large decorative lumpy bits on it. The lumpy bits made the sweater appear a bit pilly, even though the bits were intentional. Personally, I thought the bits looked like insect larva. In any case, she came in wearing a denim jacket which she had slung over the back of her chair.

I don’t remember what we were discussing in class that day (Sylvia Plath, I think), because I didn’t pay a lot of attention. The window behind me suffered from poor insulation, and a breeze down the back of my sweater served as a distracting reminder of the outside temperature.

As it was so cold out, you can imagine my surprise when I saw a mid-sized black spider making its way across the classroom floor at my feet. It occurred to me that I didn’t actually know what spiders did in the winter months, and I spent a few happy minutes puzzling that out as I stared at the spider, which made its way steadily toward the chair of the athletic blond. Upon reaching the back left leg, it started to climb toward the sleeve of her denim jacket.

At this point in my memory, I find it useful to consider the spider’s perspective: as it made its way up the chair leg, it stared into the dark, warm, blue cavern ahead. In the distance, its compound eyes no doubt detected my face, looming above it like some peach-colored Easter Island sculpture.

The cold air from the window sent a chill wind scuttling across the floor; the spider edged upward, toward the slightly swaying sleeve. It would have peered inside, undoubtedly thinking that in spite of any structural instability, the sleeve would offer shelter from the cold.

But then it would perhaps have seen through the sleeve to the girl’s pilly sweater beyond: dozens and dozens of pre-wrapped insect carcasses, all laid out like a cold cut platter for the spider who was bold enough to take advantage. The spider Land of Milk and Honey, just beyond the mysterious and magical blue denim cave. It must have seemed a fairy tale, a dream come true.

And so, I watched as the spider made its way into the girl’s jacket sleeve. And I said nothing. And a minute later, class was over. As I gathered my books to leave, the girl spoke with our professor. Not until I was walking out the classroom door did I see her lift her jacket and begin to put it on. The closed door muffled her shriek.

Thus you understand why I say my wife’s reaction to my own spider situation was karmic retribution. Had I been kinder, had I issued some kind of warning, the Universe might have proven kinder to me.

By the way, just so we’re clear, the Universe wanted me to warn the spider, not the girl. The girl had expressed her anti-male hostility at me on more than one occasion, so I felt confident the Universe wanted me to make her find a creepy-crawly in her clothes. But the spider was an innocent in this equation, and I used it as an unwitting pawn in the Universe’s game of cosmic revenge.

From here, I imagine the chain of events went something like this: I expect that the spider was ultimately discharged from the girl’s clothing and landed safely on the floor, where it hurried away, never looking back. Over time, it found itself in whatever interior heating duct over whatever disused submarine tunnel housed the winter home of Baltimore’s arachnid population. There, it gathered round all its friends and relations and spun the legend of the Magical Blue Cave which led to the Fields of Plenty. The youngest spiders would sit at the edge of their webs, hanging upside down in order to be sure not to miss a syllable. They’d all want to know about the giant cave monster which guarded the Fields and expelled the unworthy or the unprepared. They would ask how to find the Cave, and the now aging spider would make them memorize the list of local landmarks so they would be sure to know it if they ever came across it .

In time, many spiders would leave their worried mothers at home as they sought the Spiders’ Paradise. Most would never return. Others would return in despondency, offering nothing to the search; the more unscrupulous would fabricate stories or embellish the legend unnecessarily. Grandchildren would hear of it and tell their own grandchildren. Twenty generations along and the legend would evolve into the largest of the spider religions, with rites designed to prepare young spiders for adulthood and the continued quest. Spider priests would lead their congregations in dogmatic recitations of the elements of the journey to the Fields of Plenty.

After fifty generations of futile searching, many spiders would give up on their faith. The descendants of the original spider would now be scattered all over the world, and the belief would be stretched thin by the distance. Many would argue that the Fields never existed. Doubt and hopelessness would cast its shadow over the spider world.

And then, in 2006, eighty generations from the day that first spider laid eyes on the Cave and the Fields beyond, the spider world’s equivalent of Dan Brown would offer up a story to rekindle interest in the legend. This spider would claim to have infiltrated the darkest recesses of the spider priests, to have spent time exploring the holy of holies. And he would claim that the priests themselves knew for a fact that the Fields existed—they knew it for a fact because as part of the rites of initiation into spider priesthood, they all memorized the exact location of the Fields!

Such a story would spread like wildfire across the worldwide webs. Spiders everywhere would once again yearn for adventure and the promise of food without work or struggle.

One such spider, idling a morning away on the ceiling of a kitchen in London, would glance down from his webmaking to have what he at first believed to be a spiritual vision: below him was the very peach-colored Easter Island sculpture of which the ancients spoke! The sculpture which marked the entrance to the Magical Blue Cave!

Not wasting a moment, the spider dropped onto the sculpture and raced to the ground to find the wooden leg reputed to be nearby. Before he could find it, however, he found himself encased in glass and paraded around by giants as though he were some sort of trophy.

And the rest, as they say, is karma. I’m sure my spider, initially frightened, ultimately saw his release without harm as a confirmation of the fact that he had indeed located the secret entrance to the Fields of Plenty. No doubt he went off to become the greatest spider prophet of his generation.

No doubt also you will find all of this very hard to believe. Nevertheless, we are dealing here with three very closely connected bug-related ordeals, and apart from the above account, I am at a loss to explain their coincidence.

Naturally, if you have a more reasonable explanation, I’d love to hear it.