It started out as a tranquil night at the Bergs. Kathy and I had just finished our nightly ritual of playing a little drawing game on her iPad – and an episode of “Friends” was playing quietly in the background. It was just about time to turn off the lights and get serious about sleep when Kathy suddenly asked “What’s that?” She didn’t ask it with alarm, as though she had just heard an ominous sound downstairs, but more with a sense of calm puzzlement. “Where?” “Up there.” And she pointed to a strange looking dark smudge high up on one of our bedroom walls, almost to the ceiling. I was hoping it was a strange moth or maybe an earwig . . . but no, it was one the most hideous and disgusting creatures on the planet.
It was a centipede.
I don’t know what it is about centipedes that makes them so repulsive to me, but I think I would prefer to find just about anything crawling in the bedroom…. spiders, salamanders, sea slugs….. But just the thought of a centipede almost enough to send me running from the room. And I know my wife used to feel the same way. I still vividly remember a moment back when we lived in our house on Carmel Ave. and we saw a centipede somewhere in the house. Before I even knew what had happened, Kathy had run from the room, screaming. The years since seem to have toughened her up because centipedes don’t send her over the edge anymore. In fact, Kathy was ready to fall asleep with this hideous creature practically hanging over our heads.
Not me.
I was up out of bed like a shot, ready to take on this most unwelcome intruder- but unfortunately it was out of easy reach, and we don’t have a chair in our bedroom or anywhere close by, so I needed something with a long handle to have any hope of reaching said centipede and bashing its revolting little head in. But the best I could find was a toilet brush. And although it felt like it should have been sufficient for the task at hand, it fell short – despite my energetic jumping or my attempt to build a little platform out of shirts from a nearby wash basket. By the way, Kathy must have shared my optimism at first, because she asked me to wrap a kleenix around the bristles of the brush, so I was less likely to dismember the centipede and leave a stain on the wall. As it turns out, there was very little chance of that occurring.
Plan B – suggested by my wife, by the way – was for me to try and knock the thing off the wall with a belt. But not a regular leather belt, for fear it might leave a mark on the wall- but rather the belt to my bathrobe. I think she was imagining a well-aimed snapping gesture sort of like snapping a towel in the locker room – or the way Linus was sometimes depicted using his famous blanket as a weapon on rare occasion. But as it turns out, a plush velour bathrobe belt is of negligible use as a weapon, as my dozen or so limp efforts demonstrated.
Plan C – also suggested by my wife – was for me to go downstairs and bring up one of our step stools – and then go after the centipede with kleenix in hand. The direct approach did seem like a good idea- and by this point, the little monster was on the move, crawling along the ceiling line, just out of reach and probably taunting me all the while. (Good thing centipedes have such soft voices or I would have been both angry and repulsed- a scary combination.) So I ran down and returned with the step stool, only to discover that the creature was just out of reach – and with no chance to retrieve the now-discarded toilet brush, I had to go for it on my tiptoes without killing myself. And all I ended up doing was brushing the centipede off the wall and down to the floor, where I almost immediately lost track of it- (although I did flail away at what looked like a small moving smudge – but by that point, I was seeing small moving smudges everywhere.)
At that point, I crawled into bed and shut off the light – thoroughly exhausted and more than a little embarrassed – but at least grateful that I’d managed to give my wife a good laugh. And it renewed my sense of gratitude that Kathy seems to not mind being married to a guy who is not exactly the burliest lumberjack on the block.
Of course, it helps that the typical burly lumberjack would not be able to play piano for her school concerts.
Thank goodness.
pictured above: the aforementioned step stool and bath robe belt.