Ever have those moments where you relive old memories? I am blessed, cursed, and/or doomed to be able to do this in a unwarrented split second. It plays like a YouTube video in my mind's eye, minus the handy pause button (I'd kill for that), and I re-experience the emotions bound to that memory as if they were fresh. A grin can be plastered to my face at an awkward moment turned hilarious. My stomach will roil in nausea at the discovery of a romantic indiscretion. Lust begins burning beneath my skin with glimpses of recalled bare skin, and loss will bring an emptiness into my chest.
Although this is attached to positive, negative, and neutral emotions alike, it is always the negative emotions that stand out the most to me. I assume this is because my body's reactions to these emotions are uncomfortable, and thus make the next hour, day, or week a mass of time in which I look for ways to shove the memory back into its crate and lock it away.
Out of all the negativity, there is one specific memory that haunts me the most. It leaves me with the overwhelming taste of grief and loss in my mouth.
And it was caused by this lil' fella:
I was eight-years-old. Or seven. Maybe six? No. I think seven seems to be more accurate, but I'm not sure. I don't want to actually do the math though. So whatever the heck my age was, I was an awkward kid. Chubby, too tall for my age, clumsy as a half-grown puppy, and probably running around with a panda tee-shirt and socks pulled up nearly to my knees.
There are two important notes to make before I continue:
A.) My parents both worked full-time, and I was enrolled in the after-school program with my brothers. My brothers were too embarrassed to have anything to do with me. I had no friends, unless you count the twelve-year-old, behemoth of a six-grader who enjoyed beating me up near the slide. So, aside from snack time, I spent most of the two hours alone.
B.) I wanted a pet! But my mom said no. Goddamnit.
It was a day in early fall or late spring. I don't remember the exact time of year, except I was in school and it was warm enough for shorts. I had been denied my request for a pet for perhaps the thousandth time, and it was beginning to take my toll on me. "Pets cost too much money," my mom would say. "You have to feed them, walk them, brush them, blablahblah." I was eight-seven-six-whatever, and couldn't figure out a way to tell my mom about an inexpensive pet. I pondered this during my time alone, alternating between running away from my bully and relocating caterpillars from one side of the blacktop to the other. There were a lot of caterpillars.
During one trip from one end to the other, a couple of caterpillars crawling over my fingers, a light bulb turned on in my head. Caterpillars were cheap, right? They were practically free! All you needed was to find old peanut butter jars in the trash, poke some holes in the lids, and plop the caterpillar in it. Food was easy too! Just run outside and grab some leaves, courtesy of Mother Nature. They didn't need to be walked or brushed or watered. I was estactic and impressed by my own brilliance. I had discovered my first way to stick it to the man.
I dumped the creepy-crawlies I was already holding, ran inside and grabbed a empty sandwich bag from my backpack. From that point on I was on a mission. Starting first with the ones I had previously abandoned, I plopped them in the bag. And then I scoured the entire blacktop and playground. My zip-lock bag soon became squirming mass about the size of a tennis ball.
For a visual concept of what I mean. Imagine your regular zip-lock sandwich bag. And then imagine a mass of caterpillars. They should look a little something like this:
Add those two together, and... you have just created a sandwich bag filled with caterpillars! Congratulations!
So, yeah, that is what it looked like. I had probably fifty caterpillars in there. Fifty caterpillars. That's a lot. ifty pets all of my very own All squirming in my cupped hands. It was exciting. And, other than the minor problems of finding that many peanut butter jars and figuring out names, all fifty of them wouldn't cost me a dime. Therefore, my mom would definitely let me keep them. Her previous argument was totally null and void! That was the most exciting of all. I was awesome. I was happy!
The evil teacher lady ruined my plans. She did it on purpose. I know she did. I don't even remember her name, except that it most likely had to be a word meaning malicious intentions to ruin childhood hopes and dreams. She caught me as I slipped in amongst the other kids, trying to blend into the crowd as we marched to the cafeteria for snacks. Looking back on it, she probably noticed that I wasn't as clumsy as usual (I had a goal not to squish any of my newfound friends.) And she knew, like a vulture recognizes a dead baby deer from a sleeping baby deer, that I was happy, and she set out to ruin it. She took me by the shoulder, peered at me over her stupid glasses and told me that I had to "get rid of all those bugs." Her tone was harsh, but her eyes were alight with satisfaction. I knew I had lost, and I knew she was enjoying it. I hated her then. I hated her with all my little heart.
And so, with my heart filled with hate and my eyes brimming with tears, I trudged back outside. I made sure to go around the corner into a small section of the blacktop that was no longer visible from the cafeteria's windows. I cuddled my pets, all fifty of them. I felt like a horrible pet owner. I had only had them for like three minutes and already I was abandoning them to some horrible fate under a first grader's stomping shoes or in a bird's beak. Mental images of green caterpillar guts sprayed across the blacktop filled my mind, and I cried a little. Ok, ok... That was just to make me sound a little less like a nerdy wimp. I cried a lot. Snot dripping out of my nose a lot, forcing me to wipe my face several times with the front of my shirt.
Finally, after hearing my teacher lady yell for me to come inside, I dumped the contents of my bag onto the chalk-covered blacktop, directly at my feet. They did the strangest thing then. I can still see it vividly in my memory. As they squirmed away from each other, they all headed away from, forming what would appear to be the rays of the sun. In my head, it looked something like this:
And that was the last time I ever saw them. I hope they all became moths or butterflies or something, instead of just green goop on the bottom of some kid's shoe.
Did this make you sad a little? If not, you have no soul. If so, good. It should! Now remember this story. And when some kid, whether it's your kid, some hobo's kid, a student kid, or whatever, comes up to you with a sandwich bag filled with caterpillars. Let him or her keep it or else they'll be scarred for life, the deaths of fifty-or-so caterpillars forever imprinted on their souls.
