Fat Brown Beetle

A Fat Brown Beetle

Ca-runch!! Ugh. What the hell did I step on? A sparse morning city crowd flowed around me. A child's toy? No. Smashed on the concrete sidewalk lay the still body of a large brown beetle, yellow insides oozing out. No agony movement. Actually the artistic chitin wing covers were more like a burgundy, a shimmering dark reddish brown. Squished. I mourned for the beetle briefly, and for the bottom of my right shoe.

I stood still and felt ashamed, wondered if there was a crowd gathering to serve as witnesses to my grisly deed. "It was an accident." I said to no listener I knew of. Not murder one, maybe negligence, beetle-slaughter. I felt obligated to do something. Pick it up and wrap it in paper and put it in a trash basket. Remove the poor beetle from gossiping eyes and the embarrassment of death.

My contemplation of the death of a beetle was interrupted by a painfully large boom, like the concussion of a bomb blast, detonated just ahead at the intersection I was approaching. Two cars crushed together almost front to front appeared to be suspended a few inches above the ground and abruptly fell to the solid earth with a thin bounce, as though this was the way vehicles fell when dead. Faint smoke and dust rose slowly. The left car dark blue, the right that tan gold color. Gasps and "Oh my God" I heard from several directions. People frozen in place thawed quickly and began to move toward the two cumpled cars, fearfully anticipating, one would think, crumpled drivers. I did not move, not yet.

With my eyes I measured the distance from me and my dead friend to the point of the steel-crushing collision. A long hike for a beetle, a momentary few steps, maybe ten seconds, for a man walking with a distracted mind. I could have been there, between those two vehicles, smashed like a bug on a windshield. I would have been a bug on a windshield. The crowd quickly became animated and purposeful. Men and women calling out warnings and instructions to one another. "I'm a nurse." "Don't move his neck!" "It looks like her foot is trapped." "Call 911." "I called 911." "Yes, at least two people, seriously injured, I think."

I still contemplated my dead beetle. I do not have much experience with death. Maybe I have just blocked it out. I had the most playful beautiful dog: Maggie, a Cairn Terrier, the original "shaggy dog" who loved everyone. She grew old, could barely move. I took her to the vet to be euthanized. A gentle, respectful intern, a young man, gave her the first injection, then a second. Maggie lay on her side. I felt a dull sadness and shame. A tear formed in her eye and dripped a short distance. I could never forget that, and my profound uncertainty about the source of the tear. Was it a sad goodbye, "I love you." Or, could it have been "How could you do this to me? Why couldn't you keep me at home to die in my own bed?" As though she were my mother, and I was her child, a part of me wanted to die with her. But I had to just pay the bill and leave. Is that what we all do when we die? Pay the bill and leave?

The small crowd around the two cars, living bodies now being carried out, appeared to have grown methodical, a small community organized quickly, by old instincts, to cope with pain, fear, and tragedy. I was still paralyzed a bit by my path that crossed the path of the beetle, at that time. How could that be? I wanted to hold a memorial service. I wanted to purchase a plot in the high-end rich people's cemetery, erect a marble monument over her dry body wrapped in a silver casket. - Here lies Betty Beetle, a dear friend, a good mother who knew sacrifice. But that would not really happen, I understood. I looked down at my beetle and I spoke. Any person watching me might have thought I was speaking to the sidewalk. Long poetic speeches blew across my brow like dust in a storm. But I could only manage the essence, like Maggie's tear:

"Sorry. Thank you."

Strangely, I felt changed after that incident. I felt like something made me a new person, like I had disconnected permanently from my old self and would not go back. I was different, not my old self. But I soon felt coldly corrected. I am on planet Earth, in a galaxy, in the universe. There is nothing new. Everything is old.

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