There’s this bug, and I swear it’s been following me. It is rather big, next time I see him I will take a picture because I have no idea what he is, about three-quarters of an inch in length and maybe of the cockroach family. He seems harmless, he just scares me turning up in unexpected places. For instance…my picnic bag. I received this nifty bag from my mother for my birthday that opens up and has a cutting board, plastic wine glasses, flatware, cloth napkins, the works, perfect for taking on a romantic date with a bottle of wine and cheese. Well, it has thus far gone unused, which is a sad comment on the state of my dating life, but when I moved out of company housing at Shakespeare & Company last December, I packed some things inside the bag to keep safe in the car trunk as I flew off to Seattle for three weeks.

The infamous picnic bag…

I was first introduced to this bug, Bob, as my daughters named him, last fall on campus in my room above the garage. Now mind you, I kill him, and yes, I am squeamish and I squeal and react in pain and horror every time I devise a new death for this guy. My favorite is flushing him down the toilet, after maiming him significantly with the sole of a shoe, but he keeps coming back. I thought I would be rid of him completely after moving across the street into a spotless home. Surely the winter would kill off anything left in my snow-covered car for three weeks in the Dec./January blizzards.

But as you can guess Bob arose from the dead as I was unpacking into my new house. I unzipped my picnic bag and there, plain as day, he was sitting inside looking up at me with an “it’s about time you let me outta here!” look on his face. I immediately zipped him back inside. Let me mention that this bag is tightly sealed and lined with pristine plastic. I rushed the bag out to the garage to deal with another day. The thought of becoming an executioner and stomping off his little head was not in my game plan that Sunday where all God’s creatures got a place in the choir. Plus I’m not a fan of doing nasty chores, and I certainly wasn’t in a hurry to use my picnic bag with two feet of snow covering the ground, so time has passed.

There have been two Bob sightings in the house since his banishment to the garage. Once in the morning, when I thought I had dreamt him, I crucified him to the wood floor and down the toilet he went. My worst fears were realized, while Bob was safely zipped away in the garage, his brothers were terrorizing the house! Keep calm, Lori, keep calm…maybe they are a normal bug here in New England and they single-handedly keep mosquitos at bay or some such wonderful thing.

Bob never uses my cute door knocker…

After that all was quiet until my daughters showed up to spend a week with me. I put two girls across the hall in the spare room where they proceeded to have a blind date with Bob and were secretly feeding him grapes before I found out! I saw Bacchus Bob surreptitiously escaping from their room moving toward mine and immediately pounced with slipper and tissue to give him the fate he deserved. Down he went to meet the eels and alligators and anything else that lives in the master-world of the sewer system. My daughters accusingly whined, “You killed BOB?” I, with wicked fiendish glee, let out my best evil-man laugh, bwaaahaahaaaaaaaaaa!

That was three weeks ago and today I decided to tackle Garage Bob. I opened the large rolling door, took the picnic bag outside right next to the garbage can, and proceeded, with utmost caution to unzip the brand new, sparkling clean, cutting-board-laden, birthday picnic bag. It had not been opened for months since Bob’s incarceration in the below zero garage, with NO FOOD, so I hoped to find a frozen dead-bug carcass.

The elusive Bob made me take every last thing out of the bag. It is lined with white, so there was no place for him to hide, but to my dismay, NO BOB! Where could he have gone? I KNOW he was in there, but Supernatural Bob, as I now call him, somehow escaped the guillotine. Maybe he changed places with a fork or spoon like the good Sydney Carton in the Tale of Two Cities? All I know is that he is no longer a prisoner of the picnic bag, and if I ever DO get to take it on a romantic date, filled with bread, cheese and chocolate he will use that moment to roll away the stone and resurrect himself and expect worship, and a prominent place at the feast! At which time I will bestow on him the name of Jesus.

Smile with me as Celtic Thunder Heritage sings…“Place in the Choir” and have a happy Easter.

All God’s creatures got a place in the choir

Some sing low and some sing higher,

Some sing out loud on a telephone wire,

Some just clap their hands, or paws, or anything they’ve got now