Penny's Bat

My friend Penny swears she didn't shriek. She is basing this on her personal knowledge of herself, which includes the strong conviction that she is not a shrieking sort of person. She has known herself longer than I have known her, so I will concede the point. I will just state for the record that Penny emitted a brief squeak of very high pitch and decibel level that was completely out of context for the conversation we were having.

I no longer remember details of the conversation, but she was holding up her end of it when she decided to clean up a few dishes that had been left by her sink, and noticed a teabag in the bottom of a glass tumbler, and reached in to pull it out, and it was a little damp and a little squidgy but just a bit larger than your average teabag, and before she was able to fully process this observation, a wing unfolded on the teabag, which was revealed to be, in fact, a bat, and that's when the thing that couldn't have been a shriek happened.

I don't think she has anything to be ashamed of. If I had reached into the very same tumbler and pulled out the very same damp bat, there would have been an authentic shriek and an airborne glass tumbler and wild jerky moves on my part that might have disrupted the entire kitchen ecosystem. I am readily startled.

Dave enjoys this about me. At least once a day he sneaks up on me in some way that will cause me to shriek. He claims he is merely monitoring my heart health for me, but he is really doing it for his own entertainment. He can count on my reaction even though I've been on the lookout for Sudden Dave for years. At some point in every day I'm going to drop my guard, and there he'll be.

There are a number of critters that evoke this response in many people. I am not afraid of any of them. Snakes are splendid. Spiders are attractive and interesting. Bats are flat-out cool. What my sympathetic nervous system objects to is the sudden snake, the sudden spider, the sudden bat, and the sudden Dave. I want a little warning.

I'll put my nose an inch away from a spider in an orb web to admire it. If a spider walks across my pillow--and it would have to be mere inches away from my face for me to see it without my glasses--I'll jump a little, but still have the emotional wherewithal to calmly relocate it out the window. I could watch bats swooping in my vicinity all evening. But put that same bat in my bedroom when I'm not expecting it, and I'll fill my shorts. Those little black spiders that run like the wind give me the willies. One day I stepped into the very center of a patch of baby snakes and they wriggled off in every direction. I thought the ground was boiling. Everything inside me--food, bones, organs, dreams of glory--liquefied at once. I don't remember what happened after that, but I'm pretty sure there was some cleanup involved.

We'd decided Penny's bat was dead. It was kind of head-first in the bottom of the glass, and it wasn't moving, just unfolding a little. Penny also believes she didn't shriek because she likes bats, as most of my favorite people do. Therefore a damp teabag bat could not possibly have startled her in any way. Whatever: I will report that she thereafter calmly relocated the bat--in the tumbler, but without putting a cover on it--outside on the ground, under a fern. A half hour later it was gone. We're hoping for the best.

Maybe bats startle easily too. Maybe it just fainted dead away at the very moment Penny didn't shriek.

As Long As You're Peeing Anyway

I was in the Convention Center the other day and went to the restroom to pee and there, near my left foot, was a big black spider. The rest of the women in the room were very lucky, although they didn't know it, that it was me in that stall and not my friend Casey. If Casey is startled by a spider, or, frankly, if there's one anywhere within the county lines, she will emit a shriek that could be used to evacuate an entire town. She can't help it. She's like most of the rest of us, only way louder. I've heard this shriek a few times, and it is not possible to hear it without suffering a little urine leakage. So I guess if you're going to find an indoor spider, the restroom is probably not the worst place to be.

My friend is a calm, competent, multi-tasking wonder of a woman with freakish self-control, but she is undone by spiders. Her husband, early on in our friendship, demonstrated The Shriek for us by bringing in a dangling spider and passing it briefly in front of her face. He wanted us to see what he had to contend with. It was impressive. Scared the silk right out of the poor spider, who bobbed along the ground like underwear with sprung elastic. The shriek was followed by a thunking sound. That was the sound of months of our lives being sheared off.

A lot of people have a problem with spiders. I don't. I think they're interesting and most of them are beautiful, and as long as they're not in bed with me I'm happy to leave them be. I do have a little problem with snakes. Not prepared-for snakes, which are handsome and silky, but snakes with insufficient signage. A properly announced snake is a delight. I react strongly to sudden snakes, however, and also feel that they do not belong in the water or in trees.

One day on my mail route years ago I stepped in the epicenter of a nest of baby garter snakes, a hundred of them, and they all slithered out at once on every possible radius. All I could see was movement, movement totally inappropriate for a solid patch of ground, as though I had stepped in a black hole. In case you want to know what it feels like to step in a black hole, well, it's zero to intestinal-flu in point-five seconds, followed by a generalized internal liquefaction. Aftershocks of the willies continue regular as malaria for--well, I'll have to get back to you as to when they stop.

The reactions to spiders and snakes are probably hard-wired into us at this point in our evolution. The parasympathetic nervous system comes into play and floods us with adrenaline to prepare us for either fight or flight, or, as the case may be, just standing there leaking urine.  It was originally developed to help us deal with tigers. We use it to this day in preparing for a bout of public speaking, in case there's a tiger.

As it turns out, the spider at the Convention Center was glazed right into the tile floor of the restroom. It wasn't real at all. Ha ha, you wacky city employees! What an artistic sense of humor you have! You are truly the civic dickens, you are! I do think the ceramic toilet rat was a bit much.