I expected the rejection letter and put this notation at the top of my to-do list for last Thursday, when I knew it would arrive: “Weep, then move on.”
Instead, when the rejection came, I went back to bed, pleased that the morning was gray as my mood. Thirty seven minutes later, the sun burst through the bedroom window and chased me downstairs. Grabbed the car keys. Like it or not, I was moving on.
Outside, I stepped on a dead mouse in a rain puddle. Just how I felt. Got in the car, drove to my favorite downtown cafe and found a window seat. Minutes later, here came the sun over the roof of a pizza joint across the street. Place called Bowzer’s. Can’t weep with sun in your face. Now what? The answer came fluttering across the window outside.
Ever see the Harry Potter movie where keys with wings swarmed? That’s what it looked like. The things flowed from the bottom right of the window upwards, as if they were being propelled by an air blower. Dozens, then hundreds. The guy sitting at the cafe table outside looked up from his latte as they darted around him. A freshly groomed young woman emerged from the haircutting salon next door and was engulfed. Some entangled in her new hairdo.
The swarm became a cloud spreading across the street, swirling in the breezes of passing cars and trucks. I went outside where a small crowd gathered on the sidewalk, gawking at a crack in the salon’s window frame from where the creatures emerged in a stream. The salon owner came outside to see what was up.
“Termites,” announced the latte drinker, who had risen from his table.
The salon owner, now clearly distressed, bent over to take a squint.
“They’ve been feasting on your wood and now they’re flying off to find more,” Mr. Latte said.
I went back inside and fired up the iPad. Mr. Latte was right about what these were but wrong about why they were flying. It’s love not hunger. In Fall and Spring – when wet and warmth tickles their hormones – the lovers rise from dark places on long, thin, tea-colored wings, going up and up, carried (not unlike us) capriciously by invisible forces into each other’s clutches. Love quickly occurs, quickly ends and leaves them in a cold embrace falling from the heights. Sound familiar?
The post-coital landing knocks their wings off. Females crawl off to lay their eggs in some crack in a wood structure. The males? Who cares.
I pursued them for blocks on both sides of Park Street, feeling like Paul Revere but resisting the urge to cry out, “The termites are coming!”
Almost none escaped the savage traffic. I found wings in front of Sole Desire Shoes and a twitching body in the gutter near Books Inc. It’s possible some found refuge in open casement joints I saw across the street, but the cloud had dissipated by the time I reached Tucker’s Ice Cream and – as I mentally tasted a peppermint cone – disappeared. As did my bad mood. We all had moved on.
Coincidentally, today’s East Bay Times has a story about this story.