海角大神

My friend Penny swears she didn鈥檛 shriek. She is basing this on her strong conviction that she is not a shrieking sort of person. She has known herself longer than I have known her, so I will concede the point. I will just state for the record that Penny emitted a brief squeak of very high pitch and decibel level that was completely out of context in the conversation we were having.

I no longer remember details of the conversation, but she was holding up her end of it when she decided to clean up a few dishes that had been left by her sink, and noticed a tea bag in the bottom of a glass tumbler, and reached in to pull it out. It was a little damp and a little squidgy, and it was just a bit larger than your average tea bag. Before she was able to fully process this observation, a wing unfolded on the tea bag, which was revealed to be, in fact, a bat. That鈥檚 when the thing that couldn鈥檛 have been a shriek happened.

I don鈥檛 think she has anything to be ashamed of. If I had reached into the very same tumbler and pulled out the very same damp bat, there would have been an authentic shriek, an airborne glass tumbler, and wild, jerky moves on my part that might have disrupted the entire kitchen ecosystem. I am readily startled.

My husband, Dave, enjoys this about me. At least once a week he does something to make me shriek. It feels like he鈥檚 sneaking up on me, but you don鈥檛 even need to sneak up on a writer: You can just be standing there when she pops out of her own head for a minute.聽

Dave claims he is merely monitoring my heart health for me, but he is really doing it for his own entertainment. He can count on my reaction even though I鈥檝e been on the lookout for Sudden Dave for years. At some point I鈥檓 going to drop my guard, and there he鈥檒l be.聽

There are a number of critters that evoke this response in many people. I am not afraid of any of them. Snakes are splendid. Spiders are attractive and interesting. Bats are flat-out cool. What my parasympathetic nervous system objects to is the sudden snake, the sudden spider, the sudden bat, and the sudden Dave. I want a little warning. I鈥檒l put my nose an inch away from a spider in an orb web to admire her. But those little black spiders that run like the wind give me the willies. One day I stepped into the very center of a patch of baby snakes, and they wriggled off in every direction. I thought the ground was boiling. Everything inside me 鈥� food, bones, organs, dreams of glory 鈥� liquefied at once. I don鈥檛 remember what happened after that, but I鈥檓 pretty sure there was some cleanup involved.

Most of the time we fear what we don鈥檛 understand. Much of what people believe about spiders or bats amounts to slander. There鈥檚 nothing wrong with exercising a little well-informed caution, but fear in general isn鈥檛 good for us. We usually have to be taught what to fear: maybe bats, maybe spiders, and increasingly 鈥� especially during election season 鈥� entire classes of people. This rarely works out well for those people. Or for bats. It doesn鈥檛 do anyone any good.聽

Back to Penny鈥檚 bat. We鈥檇 decided it was dead. It was kind of head first in the bottom of the glass, and it wasn鈥檛 moving, just unfolding a little. Penny also believes she didn鈥檛 shriek because she likes bats, as most of my favorite people do. Therefore a damp tea bag bat could not possibly have startled her in any way.聽

Whatever.

I will report that she calmly relocated the bat 鈥� in the tumbler, but without putting a cover on it 鈥� outside on the ground, under a fern. A half-hour later it was gone. We鈥檙e hoping for the best.

Maybe bats startle easily too. Maybe it just fainted dead away at the very moment Penny didn鈥檛 shriek.