California Part Five: The Story of the Cricket

It was late on the very last night of my stay in California, and we were due to leave early the next morning to get to the airport.  Siri and I decided it was time to turn into bed.  I made my way up the stairs to her guest bedroom, and a few minutes later she called from the stairs,

“Yuck!  Did you SEE this?”

“What?”  I went to look.  There was a large, spindly light brown bug on the stair rail.  “Oh.  I think it’s a cricket.”

“Hmmm.  Maybe we should catch it for my kids.”  She turned to go downstairs to get a receptacle to keep the cricket in.  I returned to the guest bedroom, assuming she was going to catch the bug and that would be the end of it . . . no big deal.

But in a few minutes, I heard a very small voice say, “Uhm, would you like to catch it, maybe?”

Howling with laughter, I rounded the corner and took the plastic tupperware dish from her.  I like bugs, of course.  I used to make all kinds of dead bug displays when I was in preschool and elementary school, and I loved looking up bugs in my grandma’s insect reference book.  I was laughing so hard, though, that I couldn’t catch the cricket, and it ended up falling down the crack between the stairs and the wall all the way to the floor  below.

I went down and trapped the little bug in the plastic bowl, and the Penn kids had a great time examining him the next morning.

Lest you think my friend Siri has an irrational fear of bugs, sometime you can ask her about my irrational fear of fire.  I once had a fit of hysteria in college when a pot holder fell into the oven in our apartment and caught on fire, and another time, when Sarah and her oldest daughter were babies, the lunch she was cooking caught on fire in the oven and I snatched both kids and fled for the door, leaving her, PREGNANT, with TWINS inside to fight the fire, which she did without an ounce of drama.