The Great Family Legend of the Flamethrower and the Bees

(NB: Like all good legends, this one has been told and retold and transformed in the telling. The truths it tells about my family are true truths. I wouldn’t swear in a courtroom to the accuracy of some of the specifics, however)

Shortly after my parents married, they went on a quest to find some wide open spaces where their theoretical children could roam, and settled in an old farmhouse with a tottering, rusting barn on the back corner of the property. It became (or already was, and they just continued the tradition) a place to shove odds and ends that weren’t easily disposed of—old tires, riding mowers that neither rode nor mowed, piles of worn out carpet, and other similar junk.

But the west wind that comes ripping across the wide fields that surround my parents’ house are more powerful than rusted sheet metal. I remember watching through the back windows during a storm, as those metal sheets would arch back, flapping slowly and rhythmically. Over the years the bits of barn that remain were peeled off piece by piece, until finally the whole thing began to collapse on itself.

It wouldn’t do to have a giant yard for children to play in if there was a giant rusty metal death trap in the back yard, so my parents rented a massive dumpster from Ray’s Trash Service and had it parked next to the barn. Some big piece of heavy machinery came to visit for the day to pick up the busted riding mowers and other super heavy pieces to dump them in the back, and after that it was my dad and my Gapaw in work gloves. For several days, it was slow going.

Then one gorgeous morning, my sister and I awoke to a BOOM.

We scrambled out of bed and to our bedroom window, where we saw a mushroom cloud unfolding itself into the cloudless summer sky from behind the garage, in the general direction of the barn.

Knowing Dad and Gapaw, we were perhaps not as flabbergasted as one might have expected.

That morning, while we were still asleep, they had already been hard at work through the archaeological layers that were the wreckage of the barn, when some bees took exception to their work and started to buzz menacingly around them. After backing up and cautiously inspecting the area, they realized that under the giant pile of old carpeting that they had been attempting to clear, a hive of bees had made itself a home.

My dad hates bees. At least, that’s what he claims. I’ve since come to realize that when guys say things like “I hate bees” or “I hate bats” or anything else like that, what they actually mean is “I have a mortal terror of bees and/or bats.” At any rate, his aversion to bees crushed my childhood dreams of having my own beehives, in spite of my extensive research into the subject.

He and my Gapaw stood back for a long time, watching the bee sentries sternly patroling the perimeter.

Finally, Gapaw (the instigator) says slowly, “You know, what you need….is a flamethrower.”

“That’s it!” says Dad (the engineer), and runs to the garage, leaving Gapaw to watch the bees and wonder what sort of abomination of desolation he’d just unleashed.

My dad returned with the gas can he used for the (functional) riding mower, a pint jar, and a smaller box in his pocket. He filled the pint jar with the gasoline and tossed it on the pile of carpet.

More bees appeared to inspect this mysterious and vaguely threatening phenomenon.

Pleased, he tossed on another pint, and then one more.

The bees were really vexed now, a whole humming cloud of venom and sting.

Dad pulled out the box of matches from his pocket. He couldn’t get close enough to the pile of carpet, so he grabbed a fistful of matches and struck them on the side of the box in the same movement as he threw them.

Fwoom! The bees vaporized in the resulting fireball, and my sister and I woke up.

There was obviously no more work to be done on the barn that day. Dad and Gapaw watched the flames for awhile with satisfaction, and then went inside to tell Mom what had happened. Later my dad would return to the (now cooled) ashes to find all sorts of interesting treasures to show guests, like solidified pools of aluminum from an old mower deck.

They occupied a place of honor on the pantry shelf for several years before vanishing into the ether where all such sacred objects go, alongside the Holy Grail and the Art of the Covenant.

A eulogy for my Gapaw

I know his story is more complicated than this, but through the eyes of a much-loved grandchild, the thing I will always remember about my Gapaw was his sense of silliness and mischief. There was nothing too mundane to be transformed into a game or a story. The drinking water tap on the corner of the kitchen sink in their house in Lizton? That was magic water that Gapaw claimed made him more beautiful. The door that was always kept closed to curious little grandchildren, behind which was a set of dangerously steep steps to the unfinished basement with the water heater and furnace? It hid a monstrously ferocious wombat*.

When he hid plastic eggs around the yard for Easter, some contained candy, some contained money, and some contained…..driveway gravel. He claimed to be descended from bold and brave Vikings.** He made the infamous “flamethrower” suggestion when he and my dad were clearing out the rubble of the collapsed barn in my parents’ backyard and discovered a massive hive of angry bees under a pile of old carpet, which led to one of the Great Family Legends. Furthermore, he was an astonishingly good sport about my constant childish pestering for him to give up smoking*** and sometimes he let me “help” in his woodworking shop, distressing finished pieces so they would look comfortably worn-in. The smells of cigarette smoke, varnish, and sawdust always send me back there.

I grieve that his story has ended, but I’m so very thankful for how much more magical my own story has been because of him.

Thank you to my cousin Amanda for letting me borrow this absolutely perfect picture

*Gapaw didn’t actually know what a wombat was, and was very surprised one day when my sister and I came over with cuddly wombat stuffies that another relative had brought back for us from a trip to Australia.

**His side of the family was descended from Jacobites on the Scottish-English border, so this isn’t entirely implausible because Danelaw, but it seemed fantastical to me at the time.

***He did eventually quit, but it had nothing to do with my anti-smoking “campaign”

My bookshelf

We recently did some major rearranging at home, which necessitated moving about half my books to another room. So I took the opportunity to institute a new organizational structure on my library.

Last time I shelved them, it was right after I had submitted my dissertation and we had moved to a new state, and I was still thinking of myself as a professional academic. This meant I had two libraries--my Serious Scholarly Library, and everything else (i.e. my "unserious" library). 

Three and a half years later, this division made absolutely no sense, and my house was overrun with books I was probably never going to read again, certainly not in the foreseeable future. 

The first thing I did was put all my secondary scholarly sources in a nice sturdy tote and put it in the attic. If I do start writing literary criticism again, it will have to be because I am fascinated or enamored by a particular story, not because I want to get into a fight with another academic. 

The next thing I did was return to my old Brownsburg Public Library Mini-Page roots and sort everything into Fiction and Non-Fiction. (I admit I'm still not sure what to do with the texts that wobble on the border between those two categories, though--like Layamon's Brut and Geoffrey's Historia, for example, or any of the family sagas. For the time being I'm keeping them in fiction with Snorri's Edda, but I'm open to persuasion.) 

Malory's Morte Darthur is just as fictional as Mary Stewart's The Crystal Cave (and just as Arthurian) even if one got a whole dissertation chapter and the other was "just" a favorite in high school. And I took a particular delight in shelving my collection of Shakespeare plays with Ryan North's To Be Or Not To Be and Romeo and/or Juliet choose-your-own-adventures.

But the Non-Fiction section is especially magical. I paired books as though I were an elementary teacher trying to keep unruly students in line, or a first-year composition instructor arranging conference groups so that students would be encouraged to collaborate with representatives of diverse viewpoints. This means that St. Augustine, that notoriously misogynistic genius, has to sit with Rachel Naomi Remen and Kathleen Norris, two equally brilliant modern women who have a healthy respect for their own femininity (and expect others to do the same). John Calvin has to hang with Rob Bell (which makes me giggle every time I think of it). Less antagonistically, I put Margery Kempe with How to Talk so Kids will Listen and Everything you never wanted your kids to know about sex (but were afraid they'd ask) because someone with 14 children and a fraught relationship with her own sexuality probably could use the support. 

I'm delighted with the conversations my books seem to be having with each other, now that I've removed the artificial barrier of "serious" and "non-serious." Turns out all my books can be taken seriously, but they can also all be taken too seriously. 

Bonus: having my academic books out there with everything else means that it's easier for me to loan my Biography of the English Language to Queen Mab, who, I recently learned at Parent-Teacher Conferences, has been sharing all kinds of linguistic trivia during language lessons at school. It almost makes up for the toddler de-shelving everything onto the floor whenever he feels a bit destructive. 

My anti-busy Lent

I love Lent.

Which yes, is kind of weird. But I know I'm not the only person who does! Part of it is that I'm one of those people that Barbara Brown Taylor calls "lunar Christians" and seasons like Lent and Advent are made for people who like to sit in the dark and ponder their doubts. The other reason, maybe, is that Lent is a time for doing less--eating less, boozing less, Facebooking less, whatever, in order to make more space for Good in our lives. For me, more space for God usually includes going to church more.

This year, though, there were out-of-state travels to see people I love, David being on-call on Sunday mornings and so unable to help wrangle kids in the pew, stomach viruses, and a new very part time job (that nevertheless occupied a lot of head space, especially the first few weeks). And I actually ended up going to church less than usual.

At first this really bothered me. But I still kept my little fast and added a discipline that I didn't entirely fail, and I've ended this Lent with a sort of peaceful resignation--I'm not Super Christian Lady, and that's ok. 

I tried reading through the entire New Testament with the read of the congregation. I didn't finish (I got bogged down in Romans, which reminded me way too much of a really unproductive and spiritually pedantic stage in my life) but it was good anyway. I read the Message version, to try to keep away from any automatic responses to passages I've read so many times before, in very different contexts. 
Galatians, of all places, had the most to say to me this year.

4-6 "I suspect you would never intend this, but this is what happens. When you attempt to live by your own religious plans and projects, you are cut off from Christ, you fall out of grace. Meanwhile we expectantly wait for a satisfying relationship with the Spirit. For in Christ, neither our most conscientious religion nor disregard of religion amounts to anything. What matters is something far more interior: faith expressed in love.
(...)
25-26 Since this is the kind of life we have chosen, the life of the Spirit, let us make sure that we do not just hold it as an idea in our heads or a sentiment in our hearts, but work out its implications in every detail of our lives. That means we will not compare ourselves with each other as if one of us were better and another worse. We have far more interesting things to do with our lives. Each of us is an original."

Happy Easter, all you marvelous originals!