Married, with children, this is how you are apt to spend a not untypical afternoon. Your six-year-old daughter buys a figurine of a white horse while on summer vacation and it immediately takes pride of place in her stable of precious belongings. And while invaluable, it is also breakable. Inevitably, break it does, as its right ear separates from its head. The girl could not be more inconsolable if her own ear had fallen off.
Your wife mentions that she might have thrown the ear in the kitchen garbage can and that she hopes to be able to find it before garbage day arrives.
Six days go by, and garbage day is tomorrow. You know the horse’s ear is 45th on Mom’s list of priorities and, as usual, you having no particular purpose anymore, feel the strange need to find this equine extremity. As with most of your thoughts these days, this one goes from idea to obsession in seconds. Oh, if scientists could only harness that brain speed.
So, on a beautiful Thanksgiving Monday afternoon, when you imagine the rest of the world is doing great, Thanksgivingly things, you steel yourself at the prospect of searching through week-old kitchen waste to find a white horse’s ear which is the size and colour of a baby’s first tooth.
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The only thing you have to be thankful for this day is the fact that you know in which particular white plastic bag the missing toy animal part might be. So, you set up your picnic table in the back yard, open the bag, and dump out its entire smelly contents. You then begin, with the aid of a putty knife, to go through every imaginable item of kitchen refuse, bit by disgusting bit. Even the putty knife seems a reluctant participant in the job.
This exercise renders looking for a needle in a haystack laughingly easy, especially in the light of this fact: the horse’s ear looks not unlike a small piece of cottage cheese. This should make it easy to find except for another fact: Your wife chose that week to finally dispose of that container of cottage cheese that sat in the back of the fridge till it went bad. So, now you have no choice but to squeeze, with ungloved hands, every last little sour cheese bit to see whether it is soft (as cheese is) or hard (as the ears of figurines are).
Other joys await. There is porridge to de-coagulate in the event the ear is hidden within the glop. There are also used facial tissues to unwrap and examine. There are wet paper towels, uneaten breakfast cereal, and a couple dozen soggy bread crusts, as crusts have been deemed inedible by one of your children.
Now, to make the appeal of this archaeological autopsy complete, you must, the entire time, dodge and weave to avoid the attention of two very bad-tempered yellowjacket wasps that are far from pleased that you are disturbing their surprise Thanksgiving dinner.
You go through everything once, then twice, in case you missed something, and then realize this is impossible. But, into this so deeply now that victory is your only way out, you go back into the house to study, more closely, the horse’s remaining ear. Back at the table with renewed enthusiasm, you squeeze each cottage cheese one more time, and amazingly, with only a small bit of refuse to go, and on the verge of giving up, you rub some hard little item between your fingers and realize your work has borne fruit.
The man who made the first gold strike could not have been more overjoyed and you loudly proclaim your magnificence to all and sundry. Even the bees seem pleased.
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And when a joyful little girl comes tearing across the lawn to hug and thank you for preventing the partial dismemberment of Moonlight, you realize the strange way by which the rewards of this dadly occupation are realized. The horse now sits at the centre of the kitchen table again, both ears firmly attached, your faith in fatherhood bravery restored as well. Which is good because you’re going to need it for the next unpredictable crisis which lies just around the corner.
With any luck, meddlesome wasps will not be part of the next dilemma.
But they could be.
©2004 Jim Hagarty
