I don’t ask for much.
I am a simple man, living a simple life.
Twice a day, I like to sit under my maple tree in the backyard and enjoy a soda pop.
This should not be too much to want but somehow it is, thanks to a bee that also loves soda pop.
When I snap open a can, I have three minutes to enjoy my drink after which the experience becomes an exercise in survival. It takes this bee – a yellow jacket or whatever the hell it is – that long to find me, but find me he always does. And he attacks the opening in my pop can with no mercy.
I have devised ways to protect my pop. I have a flat surface piece of wood I place over the can after each sip. Today, I discovered that he is somehow able to wriggle his way under the wood.
And he discovered something interesting too. Today, for the first time, he realized that my lips are covered in pop after each drink. So, nothing to do but to attack the moist lower face of the man in the lawnchair. To fend off the assault, after each sip, I learned to curl my lips back into my mouth to remove the temptation but for the bee, that just seemed to heighten the excitement.
I fully expect, before summer ends, that the bee will find its way into my mouth as it explores where the pop goes after I sip it. I am dreading the day this happens but I am no stranger to the experience of swallowing flying creatures. Out in the field on the farm, I used to give open-air concerts as I putted along on a tractor pulling a plow behind me. Every once in a while, in the middle of a wonderful rendition of a Beatles song, an actual beetle or moth or fly would go sailing past my teeth, never to be seen again.
However, given all I’ve endured, I have never swallowed a bee.
And this might come as a surprise to you, but I don’t want to swallow a bee.
“Why don’t you drink your pop in the house?” you ask, ignoring the part about my owning a maple tree. When you have a maple tree, there is only one thing you can do on a hot summer’s day and that is to sit under it.
Unhappily, I also own a bee.
And it is up for sale.
©2021 Jim Hagarty
