SHOCKED
This morning something happened to me that is so insignificant that it doesn’t seem worth reporting on, and yet it was so bizarre, that I’m going to do it.
I was up late and went into the kitchen to make coffee. For the last few months I have shifted from making my morning coffee in a French Press to making a single cup at a time in a little plastic tube called an AeroPress that sits on top of the coffee cup with a paper filter at the bottom. I put in a large teaspoon of ground coffee, stir it, wait a little and then push the coffee through the paper filter by pressing down with a tight fitting rubber press. It takes about two minutes. And then, because I like coffee to stay hot, I put the cup on an electric coffee warmer. I sip the coffee, a little at a time, over the next three hours.
This morning I picked up the press, with the grounds from yesterday still in it, and removed the filter from the bottom and pushed the plunger to drop the grounds in the trash can. As I did so I felt an intense pain in my right pinky, my right little finger, and almost simultaneously felt an intense pain in my left pinky. What old folks malady could cause shooting pains in both of my little fingers simulataneously? I threw the AeroPress into the dishwater and examined my fingers. They were both bright red and swelling up and really hurt. I got a frozen package of food out of the freezer and pressed both fingers to it to stop the swelling. But why my little fingers, so far from each other, both at the same time? Was this some very weird form of blood clot, should I call my next door neighbor in case I passed out and hit my head on the floor? Would whatever it was slowly move up my arms and paralyze me? Was this the beginning of the end?
Finally the pain, because of the cold package, began to subside. It seemed I was going to survive. I calmed down enough to go back to coffee making. I took the AeroPress out of the dishwasher and as I was rinsing off the dirty water of the dish pan I noticed, crushed between the parts of the AeroPress a tiny wasp, a tiny drowned wasp, and I became rational again.
But how had a tiny wasp, as it was being crushed manage to sting one little finger and then the other, as it died? And where in the world had a tiny wasp come from in the middle of the winter with snow swirling outside? How had it survived in my house in the kitchen? There is no wasp nest in here. I’ve never seen a wasp in the house before.
The whole mysterious experience is too bizarre to figure out.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 