Believe it or not, when I was 18, my muscles were well built in the chest and arms. This came from spending most of my free time swinging on rope swings with the other guys in the neighborhood. After a while, with long shaggy hair and a decent tan, my wife said I began to resemble Tarzan. And so, that is how I looked when I went to my first quarter of schooling at Northwest Nazarene College in Idaho. I just mention that so I can better mentor young men in the fine art of showing off.
It must have been close to eleven o clock. I was in bed drifting in and out of sleep when I heard the bedroom door pop open. I felt the covers move and the bed settle.
Mrs. Darlene Valum lives at the same assisted living facility that my mom lived in. During my years at Bellingham High School she was the girls’ PE and Health teacher as well as the Cheerleader advisor. Today as I pass her in the hallway, I turn my head and hide my face in fear that she will recognize me even though I know that after 50 years the statute of limitations has lifted and there is no chance she could go back and change my grades.
“You need to get some new undergarments,” Cheryl commented as we walked through the Men’s department at Penney’s.
“These briefs will last another year. Don’t you never mind,” I shot back.
“They look like fishnet underwear. How long have you had them, ten years?” she asked, although she knew full well because she was probably the one who bought them.
The hallway in front of the nurse’s office at Alderwood Elementary School was lined with whimpering children and one moaning adult. The principal, Mr. Alan Thon, looked out of his office door and shook his head.
“Well, there are five less than yesterday,” he noted to the school secretary, Mrs. Lingbloom.
I walked through the automatic sliding doors and into the main entrance of Billy’s, a small family-owned grocery store in Cataula, Georgia. The checker closest to the door looked up at me as I entered, and she stared. She was a young lady in her early 20’s. I could not help but notice that not only did she continue to stare, but she also started to follow close behind me.
“Where would your cold medicines be located,” I asked her.
“Um,” she said. “Right there on aisle three.”
She pointed and continued to follow on my tail.
What is the problem, I wondered? Has she never seen a man from the Pacific Northwest? Don’t people down here wear blue Jean cutoffs with wool socks and Birkenstock sandals?
I turned around to see her following no more than three feet away. She appeared to be fixated on the black hat on my head.
Cicadas, perhaps if you’re from the west coast you’ve heard of them but never seen one. They are interesting insects in that they live under the ground as nymphs for most of their lives, only to surface above ground to mate. My wife and I were visiting Cataula in the spring of 2024, a jackpot year for Cicadas. I say jackpot in the same sense as being at San Juan Capistrano when the swallows arrive from Argentina, or at the Nature Conservancy in Santa Barbara when 33,000 Monarch butterflies congregate.
We just happened to be at the exact spot where Cicada brood XIX popped their heads up out of the ground. It was like being in the right spot, at the right time, for a total eclipse of the sun, the blood moon, and the asteroid Apophis hitting the earth.
After 13 years underground as nymphs, the cicadas were emerging, coming forth from the ground like zombies in a horror movie. Millions of cicadas climbing onto trees and on buildings, shedding their old skins to reveal winged adults. It is estimated that there are approximately one million cicadas in the ground per acre, so in the state of Georgia alone there are roughly two trillion, four hundred eleven billion, seven hundred forty million coming to the surface.
The male cicadas serenade the females with their loud calls during the daylight hours, leading to mating and egg-laying. Once hatched, the nymphs return underground to feed on tree roots until the 13-year cycle repeats. Meanwhile, the adults, like salmon, mate and fall over dead leaving a massive mess on the ground surface to clean up. They have no predators except copper mouth snakes which find them to be tasty treats. Land owners have a choice of raking up the cicadas or having a yard full of pit vipers.
For those of you from the northwest, who have never been to the southeast side of the US and experienced the strange sound of a cicada, it is something as foreign to us as our Sasquatch screams would be to a southerner.
My wife and I were picked up from the airport in Atlanta and driven to my daughter’s home in Cataula. As we got out of my daughter’s car at her home it was late afternoon. What hit me first was the high humidity on the 80-degree day. What I noticed next was the sound.
It sounded like the neighborhood was underneath an enormous flying saucer which had a bad engine bearing. I looked to the sky around the neighborhood, but it was impossible to pinpoint the origin of the sound.
“What is that noise,” I asked. “Crickets, frogs, some type of farm machinery?”
“Those are Cicadas,” my daughter Kalene said.
I stood by the car in awe listening to the sound. It was very much like seeing the Aurora Borealis for the first time. Very captivating.
Cicadas recorded from my daughter’s house.
And then I noticed them flying by, their wings humming, not like a bee, but more like a dragon fly or a large moth because these are very large insects with inch long black bodies, red eyes, and clear, orange-tinted wings.
“Wow, they are everywhere,” I said. “Flying through the air and dead on the ground like a swarm of locusts.”
And so, in my life journal I now have a notation which says: May 2024, experienced Cicadas!
Walking to the display of seasonal allergy medicines, I stopped and scanned the shelf for Benadryl. I did not realize that the young checker was inches away. As I bent down to grab a box off the shelf, I felt her strike. It was a good clean blow to the top of my head.
I stood up, pulling my hat off my eyes.
“What the heck?” I yelled.
“Oh, I almost got it,” she moaned.
I heard the drone of wings and the cicada which was on my hat, flew around and landed on my nose and we stared at each other, red eyes to blue.
Startled, I picked the big bug off by his body and held it in my fingers. The checker held out her hand, palm up for me to deposit the bug but I could see that she wasn’t excited to hold it.
“I tell you what,” I said in a calmer voice, “I’ll take it outside for you.”
I have since added to my journal: May 2024, experienced Cicadas, and customer service at Billy’s Grocery Store.
My wife says that the only reason I have ears is to neutralize the pressure to my Eustachian tubes because obviously I never listen to a single thing she has to say. Apparently she is referring to last Sunday when I met her in the car after church.
“Did you see Mrs. Critchet’s hair? It’s bright blue!” I exclaimed.
“Duh!” she huffed. “I only mentioned it five times this week.”
“Duh”- a three letter word that can drag you to the depths of humiliation.
It’s been a long time since anyone has called me a potty mouth; even so when my wife hears the words, she still gets the giggles.
If any of you have worked in the industry world like I have most of my life, terms like “Lock, Tag, Try” and “Three Way Communication” are slogans that the safety departments drill into us to keep employees from getting hurt.
“Lock, Tag, Try” of course means to lock out a piece of machinery and tag it with an explanation of why it is locked out. Then you try to start the piece of machinery to verify it is indeed dead.
“Three-way communication” means that someone gives you an instruction and you repeat it back. Then, the original person confirms that yes, that is indeed is what he meant or in my case, I get a blank look and the requestor starts all over again.
I was rummaging through what my wife calls the “sentimental junk” in my tool shed when I came across a rather large box labeled “Patents”. You see, in my quest to make the world a better place, I have patented, patent searched, and copyrighted treasures sure to impress my relatives for centuries. I call it a hobby.
I have pulled from the box one of my prize inventions: “The Mitchell Methane Arrestor.” Now I don’t want to give away too many trade secrets, but it consists of a plywood box I made which holds a used vacuum cleaner motor which I purchased from Rector’s Vacuum Cleaner Store. Also, in the wooden box are mounted two carbon filters which the exhaust air flows through.
It is estimated that Australia has over 24 million wild pigs. I was on a photo Safari in Queensland to capture on film the King Kong of feral hogs. The locals call him Jambi.
Jambi weighs over 1000 pounds and is well over nine feet long. He has a harem of 45 sows and multiple piglets. Wherever they move, they create mass destruction of the land and many a domestic animal, even humans disappear when Jambi is in the area.
I was lamenting to my wife Cheryl a few years back about being out of shape and how the young muscular guys at work were giving me a complex. She was quick to remind me that the best I could hope for was a simplex. Then she suggested that we take the grandkids on a hike in the mountains.
I found it hard to explain to my daughter Kalene that there were no such thing as haunted toilets. After my traumatic experience, I had a hard time convincing myself.
It was a curving section of the county road with a posted speed of 35 mph. Farms and homesteads lined both sides of the road as did overhanging maple and alder trees.
“Slow up in the curve. Almost to . . . yep, there he is.”
From the top of a tree, we clung to the remaining trunk which we could wrap our hands around.
Standing on branches below us which strained under our weight, we looked out over the forest treetops. We were at the same height as the giants. We were one of them.
I am standing out on the Meridian High School infield next to the pole vault pit. It is a multi-school track meet. The weather is absolutely atrocious. Quite possibly, this is the end of the world as we know it. Roars of thunder, flashes of lightning, sheets of rain followed by hail the size of marbles which are trying to destroy my umbrella, and yet, the track meet goes on.
