Swatting Flies

Six years ago, when Cliffy was just about to turn two, he spent a few days in Shelburne with my parents. He was a pretty with-it guy for a two-year-old, with lots of words and some big concepts figured out. His little vocal cords weren't quite keeping up with the ideas in his brain, though, and it could take some effort to understand him. So I still maintain that Cliffy was just talking about swatting flies, but the message my dad left went like this, "[Laughter.] I just want you to know that the apple has not fallen far from the tree. Your son has picked up a fly swatter and is walking around the patio room, banging the windows, saying, 'Fucking flies.'"


The reason I don't think Cliffy was saying, "Fucking flies," is that, although I detest flies and want my house and possibly the world rid of them forever, I don't complain about them when I'm swatting them. I might make a face when I walk in to a buzzing house, but when I pick up my swatter, I am a Woman on the Hunt, moving silently, weapon raised and ready.

I debated whether or not to admit to this publicly, but I like to let myself believe that if fly swatting was an Olympic event, I would medal. I am almost 100% accurate at Still Fly on Flat Surface. I can swat them between the rungs on the shaker chairs. I have a move like a karate chop for flies in the corner of the windowsills. I have a wrap-around move for flies on the round arms of the chandelier. I can even, with greater than 50% accuracy, get them in mid air.

Obviously, these skills are the result of a lot of practice (and a slightly overactive imagination). Flies are a fact of life on a dairy farm, especially when the prevailing winds run from barn to house and the heifer barn is 100 feet across the road. I don't know what other farm wives do, because I don't really know any, but if I don't want my house to buzz with disease-bearing creepy flying insects, I have to spend a fair amount of time swatting them. Because I don't really have a fair amount of time for anything, I have had to get accurate. I think I've said this before, but the best parenting advice I've heard was from a letter a marine in boot camp was writing a friend who had just enlisted. "Get better and faster at everything," he told her, "including eating and brushing your teeth."



I was worried for a while that I was creating a race of Uber Flies by killing all the big dumb slow ones while the zippy fast ones lived to reproduce themselves ten thousand times over. There is always a fly or two that eludes me, but in nine years of ten-day life cycles, the flies don't seem to be getting any smarter or faster. So I think I'm safe.


I would like to think that there are less flies on the farm this year than there were last year, that I am making steady progress and will someday rid the farm of flies. I could be like St. Patrick and the snakes in Ireland. I could be interviewed by Country Folks weekly. I could be sponsored by a fly swatter company. The fly swatter companies right now don't even bother to stamp their names in the plastic web, but maybe that's about to change. If I single-handedly bring branding to the swatter marketplace, I could even be in the middle column of the Wall Street Journal. Hmmm. I'm not sure I want to be in the middle column of the Wall Street Journal. That's where you get written up if you are the guy who removes dead livestock from the streets of New York City or if you translate the Bible into Klingon. So perhaps my imagination is more than slightly overactive, but it keeps it interesting.


I am a hopeless optimist about my ability to improve the universe. I think often of the traditional close to a Passover Seder, "Next year in Jerusalem," meaning not the actual center of Middle Eastern conflict, but the mythical Promised Land, where the people and their rulers agree on things and the days are productive and free of strife. I'm not sure about the real Jerusalem, but in my mythical one, a golden swatter hangs by the door, reminiscent of harder times behind us, and the air is empty and silent of the buzzing of even a single fucking fly.