Friday, September 16, 2011

A turd, a peanut and other mysteries

       When something happens that makes no sense, it can take some hard thinking before the mystery gets figured out.
       At the same time, it’s not so unusual when human or group action defies logic. In those cases, it’s a safe bet that bribery, kickbacks, and/or hush money are involved. “Follow the money,” often explains a lot.
       But other than unsolved crimes that keep even the best detectives scratching their heads, there are little mysteries that pop up in everyday life that at first, simply don’t add up. Even though they happened within the known physical laws of the universe.
       When we can’t explain something we’ve seen or heard, it makes us conjure up a parade of plausible explanations. We really want to know what happened because we’re curious. In that way, we’re like cats. Or monkeys.
       The small mysteries I’ve encountered involved a turd, an in-shell peanut, a scratching sound behind a bathroom wall, and a pilfered chocolate bar.
       One morning while backing my old Chevy out of the garage on the way to work, groggy and none to thrilled about the day ahead, I happened to notice a turd sitting in the center of the Chevy’s massive hood. The garage had been sealed up, with an automatic door and a locked side door.
       So I asked myself: How could a creature large enough to make the turd in question have gotten into the garage during the short time the garage door was opened and closed?
       There was no evidence anything living was in the garage. I filed that info away, and after careful removal of the turd, drove to work, still not convinced the turd scenario had actually happened. I thought somehow I might have dreamt it.
       But because the turd on the hood wasn’t at the top of my list of worries that day, I soon forgot about it.
       Then, several days after the turd’s appearance, I pulled the Chevy into the garage, only to hear a loud moan coming from the corner of the garage. It turned out to be Bubba, the neighbor’s big-ass gray and white cat.
       Scared, hungry and thirsty, he was huddled in the front corner of the garage. He must have wandered into the garage when the garage door was open during the usual in and out time for the car.      Once inside, he surely froze in terror upon hearing the racket of the car’s ignition followed by the ferocious whine, screech and rumble of the automatic garage door shutting.
       So there was Bubba in the dark of the garage, no way out.
I had come and gone twice a day for several days, opening the door, driving in, closing it, opening it, starting the car, driving out, closing it. Bubba didn’t want to risk a run for it during the few seconds when escape was possible.
       And at some point, he had to crap. For some reason, he decided to do so on the hood of the Chevy. Maybe he was mad at the Chevy, blaming it for keeping him hostage and scaring him. He must have been mad because cats have a landscaping gene. They like to cover up their poop with dirt or bark or leaves after they make a deposit, apparently in recognition of the unappealing look and smell of a freshly laid turd. 
        This time Bubba apparently didn’t care about conforming with the feline relief protocol. In this case, he was OK with leaving one out for any and all to see. Maybe he was just keeping warm on the hood and figured since he couldn’t detect any cover-up dirt in the garage, the hood would do as well as anywhere else.
        But the days with no food and water took a toll on poor Bubba. And when I heard him moan, it was his surrender, his cry for help. I opened the side door and he ran out as if running from ghosts. We left a note with the neighbors that Bubba was alive and free, and put out some food and water for him.
         It was only then that I realized Bubba’s owners had put up Lost Cat flyers all over the neighborhood with a photo of him on it. But somehow I’d never noticed them.
         It gave me pause to think how much of a zombie I was doing my daily go-to-work routine. It seemed that only a catastrophic event like an earthquake, flood or something requiring emergency action could have shaken me out of my 9 to 5 stupor.
         If I’d noticed the lost cat flyers in the first place, maybe I would have made the connection between hood turd and the likelihood Bubba was in the garage, long before his yowl clued me in.
        It had taken awhile, but the mystery of the cat turd on the hot car hood was finally solved. With a deep breath, life went on.
       Then one time I noticed a peanut sitting on the mat outside the door to the back yard. I pondered the peanut, because its presence didn’t make any sense. We never kept supplies of unshelled peanuts in the house. The back yard was closed off, so no person would have placed it there. Yet, there was this peanut in the middle of the mat.
        I never officially solved the mystery of the peanut on the mat. But eventually I imagined a scenario that seemed the most plausible explanation. I figured it came from a bowl of peanuts put out by some homeowner wanting to feed the local birds and squirrels.
        I imagined a bird flew overhead with the peanut. It somehow slipped out of its beak and just happened to land in the center of the mat.
        But wait. Why didn’t the bird fly back and retrieve the peanut, so it could crack the shell and eat the fabulously tasty nut?
        I pondered more. Then the light went on. The second part of this scenario featured a cat sitting in the backyard, since several neighbor cats came through occasionally. And the bird must have noticed the cat was too close to the peanut. Not wanting to be a snack itself, the bird opted against retrieving the peanut, and flew on. And because the peanut meant nothing to the cat, the cat moved on, leaving the nut where it had fallen -- in the middle of the mat.
       Case closed.
       And then there was the time I was in the bathroom and heard loud scratches coming from inside the wall above the bathtub. It sounded like someone with long fingernails was in the room, scratching the wall. It was definitely something alive, but I couldn’t think of anything living that could make that loud of a scratch from inside the wall. And nothing inanimate would make that sound. I  puzzled. But the mystery soon faded from memory because I only remember it happening once or twice over a few years.
       Then we remodeled the house. Walls were opened up, including the wall above the bathtub. Well looky here, in the open space between the tub’s outside wall and its basin, sat a cozy little possum’s nest. Aha!
       Possums were sometimes seen in the neighborhood. I saw our cat happen upon a possum once in the back yard. The cat realized confrontation was a bad idea. He made quick U-turn and beat a hasty retreat.
       That possum or one of his cousins was probably the keeper of the bathtub nest. The dexterous little long-nailed paws of a possum had no doubt made the scratching noise I’d heard on the wall. The contractor cleaned the nest out of the space and sealed it off with wire mesh.
       About this time another minor mystery cropped up.
I saw, on the dining room table, an unopened dark chocolate bar. But upon closer scrutiny I discovered, all of the sweet, rich chocolate had been craftily pulled out without leaving a mark on the paper wrapper or inner foil. Someone or something had peeled the foil from the end of the wrapper and deftly slid the chocolate bar out.
       Imagine my disappointment when I was ready to bite into some great dark chocolate, only to find an almost perfect wrapper enclosing not chocolate, but air. Who did such a sneaky, albeit crafty, underhanded deed?  My wife was not a suspect, because she wasn’t a dark chocolate fan. I would have been the prime suspect, but it surely wasn’t me. I wondered mightily.
       Again, about this time, in the middle of the remodel, I’m watching Monday Night Football, holed up in the bedroom, trying not to think of all the debt and construction all around, when I hear a loud scratching noise behind the dresser. I know immediately, something alive is under the dresser.
       I look over the end of the bed, only to see a nearly grown rat-tailed possum looking up bleary eyed, as if turning on the game had rudely awakened it from a deep sleep. He’d come into the house through a hole in the floor the builders had temporarily opened up near the kitchen so they could easily get under the house.
       For some reason I think I can lure the little fella out of the bedroom and out of the house with some shelled peanuts which, for some other inexplicable reason, I find after rooting around the kitchen. I reassure Elena, who is in the kitchen, not to panic, but there’s a live possum in our bedroom. She seems to handle the news better than I thought she would. 
       Of course I prefaced it by saying about five times, “You’re not going to believe this, but…”
       When she learns it’s only a live possum in the bedroom and not any other bad scenario racing through her mind, she is actually relieved.
       I return to the bedroom armed with peanuts only to find the possum under the bed.
       I think Mr. Possum, or Pete, as I later named him, will come out when he sees the peanuts I put on the floor. I figure he’ll be glad to follow a Little Red Riding Hood trail out of the house. He slowly ventures out and carefully takes the peanuts one by one in his little paws, and retreats. He patiently munches on them under the bed until finished.
       Then I try chocolate. He soon waddles out, takes a chunk of dark chocolate into his dexterous little paws, and ambles over to a corner of the room. He turns around and sits upright on his haunches, keeping a close eye on me as he feeds himself the chocolate. His jaws work fast. Pete loves dark chocolate as much as me.
       And he seems to like this arrangement. He’s never been  fed delicious foods. I soon realize he has no intention of going anywhere.
       So then I grab a broom and herd him out of the bedroom. He scoots out the door, down the hall, to the dining room. And even though the back door is wide open to help his exit, he opts to scamper down the nearby temporary hole in the floor.
       So Pete may have lost his nest, but he got some parting gifts. Thinking back to the pilfered chocolate bar, and Pete’s sinewy little paws, I figured he must have made earlier visits into the house via the hole in the floor. He’d sniffed out the chocolate bar on the table. He extracted the chocolate by carefully peeling the foil off one end of the bar, then, pulling the bar out little by little so he could nibble at it until there was no bar left at all. The wrapper was left behind perfectly intact.
       No doubt that if the house hadn’t been made possum proof, Pete’d be back to make another nest, and to sniff for the great, sweet dark brown stuff he’d sampled. But first he needed to find another place to set up shop. And, if he was lucky, he just might again experience the bliss he would never forget in his possum life. The bliss of eating chocolate.

Mark Eric Larson has written two books of essays, "The NERVE...of Some People's Kids," and "Don't Force it, Get a Bigger Hammer. To read, visit: 
http://www.scribd.com/Mark%20Eric%20Larson/shelf