Bugs

In the past week, the insects have returned. I’ve noticed it mostly in my bathroom, whose 50’s-pink tile seem to attract a whole menagerie of critters. First there was the spider in my shower. I didn’t intend to swamp it, but when I turned on the faucet, I found out even the residual spray from my gloriously inefficient old showerhead is strong enough to dislodge eight legs at once from a vinyl curtain.

That prompted the first of the rescue operations—plucking the spider from the draining rapids to avoid a grim reenactment of the nursery rhyme. That bit of emergency intervention was followed two evenings later by the catch-and-release of a nervous cricket (I could tell he was nervous by the skittish way he jumped) and a similar effort with a moth a few mornings after that. Each of bugs I spirited away to the bushes by my front porch.

I’ve also seen ants, tiny ones, no more than one or two at a time, darting through the grouting. I have no inclination to relocate these—my instinct is to send them to that great ant hill in the sky. But then every time I’m reach for the Kleenex of death, I remember something a friend of mine said once. He grew up in Iran and loved Persian poetry. “In Iran,” he said, “children learn an aphorism: Do not tread upon an ant when you see him, for he has life and life is sweet.”

I don’t doubt for a second that my friend crushes bugs all the time. But dang it, if I don’t feel some sort of compassion for the little pests. Life is sweet.

To be perfectly honest, I don’t want to feel this way about bugs. I remember reading Albert Schweitzer’s description of how he refrained from swatting the summertime mosquitoes that slipped through his screened door: kooky, I thought; this guy is a little too far gone. And I can build an intellectual case, an ethical case for the validity of killing lower-order pests.

And yet…there’s something about it that still, well, bugs me. It seems like such a serious thing to cause death, just because of a little aesthetic distaste. I recognize this is a flaw in my constitution, a lack of backbone—rather like insects, actually.

I’d much rather be like the friend who sent me an email the other night, who broke off in the middle of a paragraph to narrate:

a horrible weird big insect, looked like a big spider with wings, just flew at me...and I just murdered it...!!

Bravo, I say. As for me, I guess I’ll just have to wait for fall.