Buddy Holly & The Crickets! But not the cicadas

(782 words)

I was upstairs with a mouthful of bedtime toothpaste when my wife shrieked there was a huge cricket in the basement.

I finished brushing, spit, looked up in the mirror and thought, man, this will be really cool if that huge cricket turns out to be Buddy Holly.

The Texan was said to be in a plane that went down in Clear Lake, Iowa, farmland February 3, 1959, the day Don McLean says the music died.

But was he?

I tingled with anticipation as I descended the stairs. You can argue he wasn’t really a Cricket, that being the name of his band, but that’s nitpicky. I’ll bet his bandmates considered him the biggest Cricket of all.

I thought if Buddy Holly is right now in my basement I will in 24 hours be famous around the world.

Right.

That’ll be the day.

It wasn’t Buddy. It was just your average cricket.

And I in no way say that to disparage your average cricket, an insect with surprising reservoirs of meteorological intelligence. Did you know chirping crickets are capable of conveying the outside Fahrenheit temperature?

It’s true. Count the number of chirps they make in one minute, divide by 4 and then add the number 40 to reach the temp.

Or you could just once tap the weather app on your smart phone.

Being a pacifist, I, of course, didn’t squash it. I instead gently cocooned it in a Kleenex, took it outside and set it free. It thanked me by serenading me to sleep with one of summer’s sweetest sounds.

I adore crickets almost as much as butterflies.

I tend to judge insects on the sounds they make and the chances that one of the nastier little bastards is going to sting me. So I hate buzzing bees, wasps and hornets. Spiders are just sneaky. Why God didn’t think to have them come with tiny sirens is a mystery.

I’ve spent a good deal of this summer thinking of insects mostly because I was eagerly anticipating the promised emergence of the 17-year Brood II cicadas.

What the hell happened to them?

We were told this year we in western Pennsylvania and throughout much of the East Coast would be inundated with them. 

How can something that emerges like clockwork every 17 years just not show up? Could it be climate change? Fracking?

I prefer to think they’d heard all the buzz about “Breaking Bad” and decided to stay underground until they could catch up on NetFlix.

It’s a huge disappointment. I was so looking forward to the cicadas. I feel like I’ve been stood up on a date with a beautiful woman.

Or more like a couple billion really ugly ones, and when you put it into those numbers quantity versus quality becomes a real factor.

Fall of 1981 was the last time I laid eyes on a cicada. The last time, too, I had one fly into my mouth and up my nose.

I was a freshman at Ohio University when the brood took over campus to engage in their 17-year mating cycle, ironic because that was just about precisely what my batting average was in those days.

What was funny was it looked like those odds were about to change. I started off dating a pretty junior and was hoping this more experienced older woman would soon bestow the sort of education not mentioned in any of the stuffy class syllabi.

It was not to be.

Blame the cicadas.

There was this one tall, skinny poplar tree outside our dorm. Me and my buddy figured we could climb way up near the top, give the branches a good shake and unleash the kind of plague not seen since God and Moses began punking the Pharaoh.

And that’s exactly what happened. Cicadas filled the air. Some flew into the dorms,  some into the classrooms, some into open car windows

I’m convinced one particularly adventurous one found it’s way into an intimate region of that girl I so desired.

Because as I gazed down through that magnificent swarm of insects, I could discern the faint outline of that very girl glaring up at me with a look of scornful contempt.

It was the look of a woman who had a real bug up her ass, and it occurred to me that was maybe the first time in history when that phrase was put to non-metaphorical use.

I saw her a few days later and she told me to buzz off.

Didn’t bug me a bit.

If biological patterns about the timed emergence of that particular cicada held true, she wasn’t going to be any real fun until the year 1998.

Related . . .

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Bugs are buggin’ me

To be or not to be

Happy 49th Birthday to me!

My mother never even knew I was born.

I don’t mean that in one of those whiny, mama-never-loved-me ways. She loved me. Still does. Most of the time. I think.

But she never remembered anything about my birth.

“The nurse came in and brought me this big breakfast. I said there was a mistake. I told her, ‘Nurse, I’m not allowed to eat anything. I’m here to have a baby.’ The nurse looked at me and said, ‘You can eat anything you want. You had the baby yesterday.’ She walked out of the room shaking her head.”

They’d loaded Mom up with so many thought-deadening drugs she has no recollection of my delivery. Her forgetfulness will make dandy fodder for birther conspiracy theorists should I ever run for president.

I don’t know where I was for any of this. You’d think I’d have been with her snuggling nourishment or at least brushing her cigarette ashes off my little head.

Maybe Dad took me out to the bars to show me off to his buddies.

Seems like I’ve been there ever since.

I turn 49 today. And that’s the actual age, even though I’m aware it sounds made-up like someone who’s afraid to say they’re 50.

I hope to turn 50 next year although tomorrow is promised to no one so I’m not about to get all cocky over the presumption.

Both Galileo and Simpson’s creator Matt Groening share my birthday, as do Cesar Romero (The Joker; “Batman”), Alan Arbus (Dr. Sidney Freedman; “M*A*S*H”), Kinks drummer Mick Avory and “Survivor” cutie and Pittsburgh native Jenna Morasca.

The birthday episode of the uproarious “My Name is Earl” was first broadcast on a Feb. 15 so I’ve always claimed Earl Hickey as a birthday mate.

Two more: Seattle Slew was born today in 1974 and “Ticket to Ride” recorded in 1965.

The latter suffers from confused parentage. John Lennon says Paul McCartney did none of the writing and Paul McCartney says he contributed at least 40 percent.

It’s terrible when estranged parents fight over the kids.

They also argue about the tune’s meaning. Paul says the title referred to Ryde, a small Isle of Wight town on the British Railways line; John says it referred to health cards indicating German hookers were disease-free enough to “ride,” ride being German slang for sex.

I guess the best birthday I ever had was my 19th. I was a freshman at Ohio University in Athens, then as now home to the No. 1 party school in America. My real brother came into the TV room at the old fraternity house where we both lived and wished me a happy birthday in front of all my great ceremonial brothers.

Right away, two of the older guys said they were taking me to lunch.

It had been a harsh winter in southeastern Ohio. But this day was unseasonably warm. The snows were gone and every one of the 14,000 students and most of the carefree professors were looking for an excuse to party.

We had a two-hour lunch at The Pub and stepped back out into the warm spring sunshine.

The quarter-mile walk back to the fraternity house became like a pre-social media flash mob. Every single door we passed opened and someone friendly or beautiful emerged happy to see us.

And everyone of them was carrying a six pack.

The fun lasted all night and it was one of the greatest parties I’ve ever been to and I just happened to be the cause of it.

I wish something like that could happen again today. The world needs more impromptu parties in the spring sunshine.

I mention this all today because it’s now impossible to duck our birthdays. I’ve heard from dozens of friends on Facebook who sent birthday wishes.

Thank you, one and all. I hope all the good wishes for me to have a great day come true and then boomerang right back onto you.

I don’t expect any impromptu parties to blossom on this still-wintry day. It’ll all be low-key and that’s fine with me.

I’ll be happy to spend my 49th with my wife and daughters. They’re taking me out to dinner tonight at Rizzo’s Malabar Inn, my favorite Italian restaurant. We’ll have pasta, some wine and a bunch of happy laughter.

And then, if the kids get to bed early enough, this lucky birthday boy may get a ticket to ride.

Yes, it’s always been a dream of mine to celebrate my birthday on England’s Isle of Wight.