On Cockroaches
O Fishing
At the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences they have a display of Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches. It’s one of my 8-year old son’s favorites and the one he points to whenever my wife is with him. “Don’t you just love them mommy?” He is being sarcastic, because she in fact does not love them and regrets deeply that we taught him sarcasm.
Her disgust really arose during our first year of marriage, when we lived in a Miami apartment teeming with giant flying cockroaches. The locals called them Palmetto bugs, which make them sound cute and banal, not the terrorists we have as roommates. At night they bang around the kitchen, flying into cabinets, keeping us awake. At one point, my wife refused to open the silverware drawer, and soon, just abandoned the kitchen entirely. That summer–as we’re moving out of Miami–we fly to California to say goodbye to my father. He’ll be dead by September.
My disgust arrived much earlier, during my first year of high school. I was a lazy teenager, often in bed reading books or watching television and not doing my homework or talking to my parents. These days they’d have diagnosed and medicated me for depression but it was the early 90s so I was just “moody and weird.” This worried my father. He wasn’t around often and we weren’t terribly close and he was also probably depressed, but he decided it was his job to give me “tough love.” I needed to build a work ethic, he told me. So he took me to work with him where he had to clean out a recently vacated apartment and at the front door of an empty unit, he handed me some cockroach fogger and a tarp and told me to put the latter over my head. He then pushed me inside, where thousands of roaches fell from the ceiling.
My father brought up the cockroach story often, especially during the last few years of his life. We had little else to talk about. He was only 58 when he died and I knew there were a lot of regrets, but I didn’t want to hear them and I’m not sure he wanted to ever tell them to me. We talked about the Dodgers or he’d lecture me on politics and then he’d say, “I can still see your face when you came out of that apartment. You were shaking all day after that. It was so funny.” He’s right. It was.
My son, however, seems unafraid of most creatures. I think it comes from those first few months of the Covid lockdown, when he was three and daycare was shut and my wife worked at the hospital, so it was just me with him and we spent hours each day by a pond, him with a fishing pole I Tom Sawyered from a stick and string. He’d dig in the dirt, show me worms and centipedes. He wanted me to use my phone to identify the taxonomy. While the entire world fell into depression, I found those months some of the happiest of my life.
Actual roach beneath image.