Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons
I once met a man who could only talk about The Moody Blues.
I was in grad school, scouting golf course greens for insect pests. He was superintendent of a county course. It was hard to get anything done. He would wax on about the band’s recent concert performance, or quote lyrics that to him summed up life and the universe in a couple of lines. I could see he was going through a hard time, recently divorced.
I picked up an Ataenius beetle from the fifth green and dropped it into his palm. He just stared at it. I explained, tiny as it was, the damage their root-feeding larvae could do. I showed him where the tips of the bentgrass had already yellowed. Soon the plants would die, leaving a bare spot, bad for play and an invitation for weeds.
He was silent a long time, eyeing the beetle as if it were a great revelation. It was shiny, jet black. Light from the morning sun reflected off parallel grooves on its back.
“Isn’t life strange?” He said, citing the chorus from one of their old songs. “It’s beautiful.”
It’s usually something small that destroys us.
Alfred Fournier is an entomologist, writer and community volunteer living in Phoenix, Arizona. His poems and short prose have appeared in Lunch Ticket, Delmarva Review, American Journal of Poetry, Hole in the Head Review, New Flash Fiction Review, and The Indianapolis Review.
