Grasshopper Tale

As fairy tales go, it isn’t much.

Nobody will make an epic trilogy out of it.  Michael Bay will never pick up the option.  My story will never have been brought to you by Generation X Toilet Paper—For When Your Life Is In The Crapper.

But it’s my story, and I’m proud of it.

If you want to go all the way back to the beginning, I’d have to start with my childhood and all the time I spent catching frogs and watching bugs in the lake near my house.  If I were the sensitive, tea-drinking sort I could wax poetic for a couple of pages about my hippie parents and how they instilled a respect for nature into the essence of my soul.  Enture chapters could be dedicated to the tears I shed over missing pets and roadkill and the nest of rabbits our cocker spaniel found and shredded.

But this fairy tale isn’t about any of that.  It’s about the day I was nice to a grasshopper.

I was on my way to work.  I’d just been told that Friday would be my last day in the warehouse, and I was thinking gloomy thoughts.  This was actually an improvement.  The day before, when I’d first gotten the news, my thoughts had been frantic and terrified, the sort of trapped-rat thoughts that bite and tear at you until you scream or put your fist through something just to make it stop.  But that had passed, and now I was just tired and depressed.  We’d have to go on welfare.  State insurance.  The kids wouldn’t get much for their birthdays this year.  Life was going to suck.

It was muggy and hot, and I had the windows rolled down to save air conditioning.  I slowed to a crawl as I approached a construction site, and I rested my arm on the door.  Something tickled it.

I jerked my arm inside the car, thinking spider.  But instead I saw an enormous emerald-hued grasshopper about three inches long.  It clung to the door frame where my elbow had been, and its antennae twitched.

I was on a four-lane road with a wide median.  If I knocked him out of the car now, he’d get squished for sure.  I kept my left arm tucked in the car as I inched past the construction area.

“Better hold on tight, little G,” I told the bug.  “It’s about to get hairy.”  Slowly I left the construction area behind and accelerated back to cruising speed.

The grasshopper flatted out, and his length went from three inches to almost five.  Then he began to creep forward.

“I don’t know if that’s a good idea, dude,” I said.  It was hard to watch the road with this huge bug taking up my attention.  “You need to hold on with all six.”

But the grasshopper kept moving, and soon he’d crept onto the arm of my rear view mirror.  Now he was protected from the wind on three sides, and I relaxed a little.  “Good call, little man,” I said.  “Stay there until we get to the warehouse, okay?  There’s a field right next to it where you’ll be safe from us dumbass humans.”

I could finally concentrate on my driving.  Traffic was light, since I worked a weird late-morning-to-early-evening shift.  I always missed the worst of the rush hour traffic, both coming and going.  Something else I was going to miss.  My next job would probably be eight to five.

I was going to miss a lot about my job.  It wasn’t the best-paying in the world, but the hours were good and the people were decent.  My next job might be another good one, or maybe I’d be stuck working with a bunch of racist assholes like my first job.  There was no way of knowing.  That jittery, trapped-rat feeling was back. I’ve always hated not knowing what to expect. Unhappiness was preferably to uncertainty.

I came to a stop sign and drummed my fingers on the wheel.  My radio was broken, and I couldn’t afford a replacement.  Some music would be good right now.  Anything to distract me from what was coming in three more days.

I saw the grasshopper creeping out of his safe nook.  “Oh, hey, don’t do that,” I said.  “We’re still on the road.  You’re going to get blown away.”

The insect paid me no mind and proceeded to stalk slowly to the top of my mirror.  If I tried to shoo him back, he’d jump away—straight into the middle lane of a busy intersection.  I made my turn, accelerated very slowly, and hoped for the best.

The wind picked up, ruffling the grasshopper’s wings.  My eyes flicked back and forth between the road and the insect, and I prayed that nothing would happen that required lightning reflexes.  That would be a hell of a thing to write on my tombstone:  DISTRACTED BY A BUG.  The kids would do that just to be smart. They had a weird sense of humor.

Finally the wind overcame the grasshopper’s considerable strength and blew him off—straight into my car.  “Fuck!” I screamed.  He blew past me; he was behind me somewhere.  Maybe on the back of my seat.  I leaned forward and slowed down, probably pissing off the teenager in the coupe behind me.  He tailgated me so hard I couldn’t see his headlights.  I slowed down a little more just to be a dick and ignored him.

“Please don’t be on my back, please don’t be on my back.”  I never minded bugs, as long as their legs didn’t touch me.  That was the dealbreaker.  If I felt long, hairy grasshopper legs crawling on my neck, I could not guarantee its safety—or mine.

But there was the warehouse, and I pulled in with relief so great I almost pissed myself.  I found a spot next to the little meadow and got out.  I couldn’t leave the windows down, or someone would steal everything in my car that wasn’t nailed down.  And if I rolled up the windows the grasshopper would bake.  So my final leg in this commute of the damned was to find the grasshopper and shoo it out of my car.  I found a fast food cup and pried the lid off.

The grasshopper was perched on top of my head rest, for all the world as though he was checking out the view.  I nudged him with the cup, he gave a mighty HOP—and then he was gone.

I checked the pavement behind me, but there was no sign of the little guy.  I searched my car very thoroughly, verifying that he hadn’t hidden in the garbage somewhere, and finally I rolled up my windows and locked my doors.  I didn’t need to be late for work today.  Now while I desperately needed a good reference.

So that’s what happened.  Not much of a fairy story.  But the interesting part is what happened after.

My daughter took it into her head to plant a vegetable garden in the back yard, to save money on groceries.  Edamame, green beans, tomatoes, and summer squash.  And every single crop took off like gangbusters; they flowered and fruited weeks ahead of schedule, and they produced like a machine was just running them off.  My daughter has been having the time of her life back there.  She loves feeling useful.

And in the four months since she planted, there hasn’t been a single insect in the entire garden.  She’s never been bitten by a mosquito while weeding, and not one leaf has been nibbled.  Everyone’s jealous of our tomatoes, which are the size of softballs, and our neighbor Nate has threatened to torch our house if we don’t give up our secrets.

I don’t know what to tell him.