“Do not go in fear, Grasshopper.” — Kung Fu
You’ve heard of Aseop, right? Greek dude? Lived around 600 BC? Wrote fables, like the one about the Ant and the Grasshopper?
Okay, I’ll remind you.
The Ants spend all summer trundling food to their storehouse, using adorable little wheelbarrows in this illustration, while the Grasshopper sits in the sun and plays his fiddle.
By late autumn, the Grasshopper is hungry. He sees the ants drying out the grain they’d stored and asks if he might have a bite to eat.
“What were you doing all summer?” demands an Ant. “Making music,” replies the Grasshopper. And the Ant tells him, in so many words, to bugger off.
It’s not that Ants hate the grasshopper species, if they are a species and not one of those other categories I learned about in high school. They just feel — and it’s hard not to sympathize — that the Grasshopper could have done some food-gathering rather than being a full-time fiddler.
In which I out myself as an ant
Given the choice implied by this fable, any sensible person would choose to be a fiddling Grasshopper, but one with a band and a capable agent. No one in his/her right mind wants to be an Ant, with or without a wheelbarrow. W. H. Auden wrote “all the summer through the water saunter,” not “all the summer to the storehouse trundle.”
The ‘hopper looks happier
And yet, much as I want to be a Grasshopper, I’m sadly aware that if I ever get to retire, I’ll probably be busier than ever.
I mean, I have several friends who work as many hours as I do but spend their free time draped in cats and watching television. When I ask them what’s new, they say things like, “Not much. Pixie coughed up a furball. So what’s up with you?”
“Well, I wrote a new blog post and a bunch of tweets and a synopsis of my novel. I’ve found a rental in Venice for next year’s get-together with my English friends and now I’m looking up flights for four people from three different airports in England, but I need to leave soon to buy linoleum because I’m redoing the front bathroom. Also … ”
I suspect that while I’m talking on the phone my friends go right on watching television. Wouldn’t you?
Is there any hope?
The desks of non-busy people probably look like ads for gracious living. Hello! Some of these people might not even have desks! Whereas my desk is covered with bills, photos that need scanning, receipts I haven’t logged in Quicken yet, books I might want to quote from, and Post-It notes reminding me to do things.
Lying on top of these things, sound asleep, is the cat.
All cats are Grasshoppers.
Am I doomed to trundle? Can a life-long Ant turn into a Grasshopper? Are there lessons I can take? A school I can go to? Some wise elder, like Master Po in the old Kung Fu TV series, from whom I can learn the ways of grass and hopping?
Okay, the question’s out there. While I wait to hear from you, I’ll just illustrate this post, shift the cat, pay the bills, and make a poster for tomorrow’s Occupy protest.
“To be yourself, Grasshopper, feel the heartbeats of others, above your own.” – from Kung Fu, with thanks to Steve Geller.
P.S. Grasshoppers are suborder Caelifera in the order Orthoptera in the class Insecta. Only an Ant would have bothered to look that up for you.
