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09/24/2013
Plague of locust
The last swim of the summer took place in our neighbor's pool. After the standard boyish frolic (gleeful pantsing) and the requisite motherly threats (baleful warning), Charlie and his friend H. grudgingly hauled themselves out, toweled off, and prepared to trudge back home. But as they walked past the pool filter's reservoir, H. spotted a grasshopper, floating, apparently dead.
"Let's take it home," he suggested, and Charlie was quick to agree: "Yeah! We can cut it open!"
My lifted brow was eloquent enough that he hastened to add, "And look at it with a magnifying glass." (You know, Mama: For Science!)
Back at my house, they repaired to the den, where they busied themselves with the corpse.
Or did they?
Apparently they did not. Oh, they were busy, though not with a magnifying glass but with magnets and Snap Circuits. No, it's the corpse part that was in question, because the next thing I heard was an excited squawk: "Come see! COME SEE! COMMMMME SEEEEEEEeeeeeEEEEE Mama oh MAN come SEE!"
So duly I come'd see, to find that they had — well, they had done this:
Do you see that poor creepity bastard moving?
Despite my gentle suggestion that maybe, just maybe, the grasshopper had only been mostly dead, the boys were convinced that they had successfully reanimated it — so sure that they were practically sketching out a plan for selling a goddamn franchise. I have to hand it to them, though; they were reasonably pragmatic about its long-term prognosis. When I offered Charlie a container with some holes poked in the lid, Charlie declined, opting instead for what seemed to me a reasonable standard of care, expectant management. "He's not at that stage yet," he told me, in the same somber tone someone once used of him. "It's not well at all," indeed.
Still, the grasshopper clung to life long enough to be moved to the mobile step-down unit, a nice glass jar stuffed with damp green leaves. He did well enough there, flinging himself against the lid with increasing vigor until I suggested that maybe it would be a good idea to discharge him to the competent care of his family. "You've given him a second chance at life," I urged. "Shame to make him waste it."
We turned him out of his jar into the rainy evening. I don't know what Charlie was thinking as the grasshopper sprang away; I was only hoping he'd hurl himself far enough into the bushes so we wouldn't find his frizzled husk tomorrow. I didn't really worry about Charlie being sad or disappointed. I was mostly just terrified he'd want to hook it back up to his homemade AED.
So all this suggests a few possibilities, aside from my concern Charlie will now think that this is a perfectly good way to perk up any living creature who's looking kind of, you know, peakèd. One of these two disturbing things is true: Either I let my kid electro-torture a living creature for his own idle amusement...or it was really dead, as the boys insisted, and they brought it back to life.
It could conceivably be, as a friend suggested on Facebook, that Charlie and his friend "metaphorically rolled away the stone from in front of the tomb door and let the resurrected grasshopper out. A whole new branch of grasshopper religion just cropped up and they'll probably be handing out pamphlets on street corners by lunchtime."
Sure! Why not? It could have happened. I believe! Look, if I have to choose between recognizing myself as a parent who blithely lets playdates go vicious, or hailing my son as the new grasshopper god — well, I think I just got religion. Now let us all bow down before Charlie and lick his sacred batteries.