The Cricket and the Grasshopper

There must be a time in childhood when great impressions are made.  I’m thinking it is somewhere between ages 5-7.

Any child development experts reading feel free to confirm or deny.

Anyway, I have a lot of vivid memories from that period; fewer from later and fuzzier ones from earlier. For better or worse, I remember vivid details about that time period: 

• Tying Shoes – Not only can I tell you the day I learned to tie my shoelaces, I can also tell you a big national event (Super Bowl V) was going on at the time. I can still envision the spot where I did it.
• Wasp Nest – Then, there was the day I accidentally ran across a wasp nest, as I went to turn on the water spigot, ended in disaster! A Scooby-Doo-like chase scene, followed by seven stings (count them 1-2-3-4-5-6-7) occurring in the self-same carport as my escape failed.
• Ham Shack – Not all of the memories from this era involve injury and insult! Some included fascination and imagination. When my dad built his ham radio shack in the attic of our Memphis home, he also constructed a playroom for me just off the radio room. I spent hours and hours in creative play in that room and I loved, especially, to consider a ‘space walk’ into the vast reaches of the insulation-covered rafters located just outside the playroom.

My dad suggested that, maybe, this was not a good idea and, so, my space travel had to be curtailed. Still, I loved that playroom and spent many hours there. 

I don’t know what it is from that era. Discovery? Trial and error? Little boy curiosity? Whatever the case, that era is indelibly etched in my brain.

And so it was with me and the story of the cricket and the grasshopper an (not to be confused with the fable: the ant and the grasshopper).

As a six-year-old lad, I became very familiar with crickets. In fact, I became an entrepreneur. The fellow across the street, you see, was a fisherman. And he paid top dollar for crickets to use as bait during his trips along the Mississippi.

I think we collected a quarter a pop.

So, if you waited until just after dark, when the bright street lights came out, cricket activity up and down our street became very active. It didn’t take long until each of us had collected a few of the jumpers in a coffee can to take across the street.

We lived on Fortune Avenue. This is fairly good imagery, as each of us netted quite a fortune indeed at twenty-five cents per. All us little shavers made good ice cream money for the week through our cricket business!

Fairly well versed in cricket inspection, one day I noticed another hopping insect in the Fortune Avenue biosphere. I had never seen a grasshopper up close until that day. The details I am about to tell you came back to me in a flourish the other day when this little fellah landed on my windshield.

I noticed that he, like the cricket, had those pronounced, hinged legs (albeit without the tell-tale chirping sound we are so familiar with). And, like the modern day version who greeted me last week, this guy had that same green-gray caste along with longish antennae and large (dare I say) bug eyes.

He hopped around in a similar fashion to my cricket friends. As I noticed this, my six-year-old logic made an unfortunate leap, so to speak. Crickets jump. Grasshoppers jump. Ergo, they must be friends. 

To test the theory further, I found my quarter-business Folger’s coffee can. Later, I found a cricket and I also found a grasshopper. Sorry to say, he was much too obsequious about joining the experiment.

I put the two buddies together in the can and, as six-year-olds do, I got distracted and went to do something else for a while.

Some time later, I came back into the experiment room. I’m not sure what I was expecting. Two insects hanging out by the fireplace? Sharing a brew? Watching the game? As I said earlier…six year old logic.

Here’s some foreshadowing. If you’re willing to wager, bet on the cricket. And if you are looking for some sort of fableistic ending of this story, don’t read any further. Click off the blog. Go to the Hallmark website or some other bucolic location.

When I looked in the coffee can, a bit of my childhood innocence was lost. There were grasshopper parts everywhere! Simply put, the cricket tore the grasshopper apart…limb by limb. Not sure what prompted the carnage; don’t really want to know.

I’ll spare you the rest of the details.

For simplicity, let’s just summarize it this way: the experiment did NOT end as I had envisioned it.

So, what’s the take-away on this vivid and poignant childhood moment? Well, I think there are a couple possible ways to answer the question.

• First – Things don’t always go as planned. Easy enough.
• Second – Creatures don’t always get along in a confined space (one look at each day’s headlines can confirm this).
• And last – and most poignantly of the lessons – it’s not smart to try to mess around with Mother Nature.

JG

Originally posted 9/24/2014