My manhood was seriously challenged this evening by my family. For some reason they attributed my compassion on sparing the life of some poor hapless cricket for the past five days to cowardice. So when I arrived home tonight they demanded that the cricket situation be addressed. You would think I had caused the crisis. In fact, my wife was the one who five days ago could not face the prospect of dueling one-on-one with the intimidating arthropod. So she did the best she could – grabbing a small tupperware bowl and trapping the cricket under our kitchen table.
I looked at the occasion as the perfect opportunity for a science experiment. Let’s see how long the hop-happy creature could exist without any victuals. I guess I failed to sense the urgency of the situation. Anyway, there was a bit of “out-of-sight out-of-mind” perspective as well. A couple of times we had some dangerous incidents where one of Julie’s visiting friends inadvertently nudged the tupperware bowl under the kitchen table. But fortunately the captivity was not compromised.
Scooter did not seem to show much interest in poking around the critter. Here was a smaller creature he could actually dominate, but he just ignored it – hard to figure when you see how he likes to assert himself out in his protected fenced-in yard against any passing dogs.
So when pushed to the edge, I responded tonight by bravely slipping a piece of paper under the bowl and transporting the cricket outside to the edge of our property where I could release it back into the wild. (So for all of you who are counting, there is one more cricket on the loose to deal with.) I would have been happy to squish the fellow (interesting: he had not lost any of his bounceability) but the family (in what I thought was a rather two-faced contradiction) objected to the crunchiness of such brutality in the confines of our kitchen. Hopefully my manhood has once again been established.
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