As edited, early 2015
I once had a friend, Steve, who developed a wonderful talent late in life. He learned to communicate with ants.
Steve would come by the house every so often and regale us with stories about his conversations with ants. He once explained to us why ants so often seem like they’re in a massively-confused state of methamphetamine-induced frenzy as they zig-zag from one place to the next, retrace their steps, almost crash into other ants, and then take off like rockets, just to do it all over again. I don’t remember the explanation (we had just finished a quart of Partida Elegante Extra Añejo Tequila), but it seemed perfectly rational to me.
Steve’s cross-species linguistic talent enabled him to become a rich and happy man.
It wasn’t long after he started communicating with ants that he told us ants mourned the loss of their loved ones just like people do. The difference, of course, is that ants’ facial expressions, tears, and cries of sorrow are almost impossible for us to perceive. So we did not know.
Well, Steve knew. And he decided he would do something to comfort them in their times of grief. He created an ant funeral home.
He took the limp little bodies (or crisp little bodies, in some cases) of dead ants, placed them in tiny coffins made of hollowed-out coffee beans, and arranged solemn services at which friends and relatives of the dear-departed ants would speak in hushed tones about how hard they worked and how wonderfully well the dead ants treated their friends and families. Because there is really no appropriate place for ant coffins to be buried (inasmuch as getting permits for ant cemeteries is next to impossible), they would burn them after the services, sending tiny little whiffs of coffee-scented smoke into the sky, carrying the remains of the little dead ants up into the air to be deposited a few feet or a few miles away, depending on the prevailing winds.
The families and friends of dead ants paid Steve handsomely for his highly dignified funeral services. They did not have money, of course, but they did have what amounted to armies of friends and relatives who could find miniscule scraps of gold and platinum amongst all the tiny grains of sand and dirt they carried from place to place. They deposited those scraps of precious metal in a seldom-used room in Steve’s house.
In short order, Steve realized that he had hundreds and hundreds of pounds of precious metals in his storeroom. As fast as he’d sell it (making quite a lot of money each time), the grateful ants would refill the room again. Steve used his money to build a coffee-bean-hollowing factory, along with a lovely house for his personal use, and to buy a weekly quart of Partida Elegante Extra Añejo Tequila. He also bought a fabulous river boat he named Felicity, where he entertained untold numbers of eccentric women. That’s another story in itself.
Steve truly adored his ant friends, and he grieved along with them when their family members and dear friends died. But he was so happy he could help relieve their pain, if for just a little while, that he devoted his attention to keeping the funeral pyres burning.
When Steve died just after his ninety-seventh birthday, his ant friends returned his devotion by fashioning a gigantic coffin of whole, French-roast coffee beans. After an extraordinary procession, during which billions of ants passed solemnly by his coffin, his best ant friends—who had worked hard to hollow out a large number of coffee beans—filled each of them with Partida Elegante Extra Añejo Tequila, dragged them one by one to Steve’s coffin, and poured the contents over Steve. Finally, they lit the pyre, and Steve’s happily drunken ashes drifted across the sky, dropping bit by bit to the ground where his beloved ants toiled so tirelessly.
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Below, as originally posted 8/14/2014 (after much earlier original post on another of my blogs).
I once had a friend, Steve, who developed a wonderful talent late in life. He learned to communicate with ants.
Steve would come by the house every so often and regale us with stories about his conversations with ants. He once explained to us why ants so often seem like they’re in a massively-confused state of methamphetamine-induced frenzy as they zig-zag from one place to the next, retrace their steps, almost crash into other ants, and then take off like rockets, just to do it all over again. I don’t remember the explanation, but it seemed perfectly rational to me.
Steve’s cross-species linguistic talent enabled him to die a rich and very happy man. It was just a few years after he started communicating with ants that he told us that ants mourned the loss of their loved ones just like people do. The difference, of course, is that ants’ facial expressions, tears, and cries of sorrow are almost impossible for us to perceive. So we did not know.
Well, Steve knew. And he decided he would do something to comfort them in their times of grief. He created an ant funeral home.
He took the limp little bodies (or crisp little bodies, as the case may have been) of dead ants, placed them in tiny coffins made of hollowed-out coffee beans, and arranged solemn services at which friends and relatives of the dear-departed ants would speak in hushed tones about how wonderfully well the dead ants treated their friends and families. Because there is really no appropriate place for ant coffins to be buried, they would burn them after the services, sending tiny little whiffs of coffee-scented smoke into the sky, carrying the remains of the little dead ants up into the air to be deposited a few feet or a few miles away, depending on the prevailing winds.
The families and friends of dead ants paid Steve handsomely for his highly dignified funeral services. They did not have money, of course, but they did have what amounted to armies of friends and relatives who could find miniscule little scraps of gold and platinum amongst all the tiny grains of sand and dirt they carried from place to place. They deposited those scraps of precious metal in a seldom-used room in Steve’s house.
In short order, Steve realized that he had hundreds and hundreds of pounds of precious metals in his store-room. As fast as he’d sell it (making quite a lot of money each time), the grateful ants would refill the room again. Steve used his money to build a coffee-bean-hollowing factory, along with a lovely house for himself, and to buy a weekly quart of Partida Elegante Extra Añejo Tequila. He also bought a fabulous river boat he named Felicity, where he entertained untold numbers of eccentric women.
Steve truly adored his ant friends and he grieved along with them when their family members and dear friends died. But he was so happy that he could relieve their pain, if for just a little while, that he devoted his attention to keeping the funeral pyres burning.
When Steve died just after his 97th birthday, his ant friends returned his devotion by fashioning a gigantic (in their eyes) coffin of whole, French-roast coffee beans. After an extraordinary procession, during which billions of ants passed solemnly by his coffin, his best ant friends worked hard to hollow out a large number coffee beans, fill each of them with Partida Elegante Extra Añejo Tequila, drag them one by one to Steve’s coffin, and pour it over Steve. Finally, they lit the pyre and Steve’s happily drunken ashes drifted across the sky, dropping bit by bit onto the ground where his beloved ants toiled so tirelessly.
Steve had trained a number of his ant friends to run the coffee-bean-hollowing factory, so when he died his legacy lived on.
I wrote this little piece just a tad over six years ago. I dredged it up while trying to recover posts I made to an erstwhile blog of mine, Musings from Myopia. In a fit of dissatisfaction with my writing and myself, I killed Musings from Myopia on August 28, 2007. My mistake in killing it was that I failed to adequately back it up before pulling the plug…so I am in the position of having to resurrect it in a VERY painstaking way.
I edited this post from its original; I hope editing improved it. This post is evidence that I have been “this way” for at least six years. It’s what prompted me to begin writing another piece (mentioned in today’s Thoughts for the Day) that I tentatively classify as an “adult’s story” until I learn of a more appropriate term.
