Published Tuesday, January 08, 2008 8:31 AM
Updated Tuesday, January 08, 2008 8:32 AM
Priest's Confessions
Men are strange; biologists are strangerI know two things:
1. Men and women are different.
2. Biologists are in their own league when it comes to different.
I have learned the second one through many hard lessons.
As a way of explanation, I offer the story of the Madagascar hissing cockroach.
My husband was the Director of a Science Education Center housed at USC-Aiken.
He used these cockroaches, along with other various mammals and insects when he went to schools to talk to school children, He took my Jeep when he went on one of these school talks about eight years ago.
A few days later, as I drove my two kids to school, going about fifty miles an hour, the said cockroach reared its ugly head. And I do mean ugly. The hissing cockroach runs four to five inches long. And there it was, right there on the car seat next to me. Cockroaches are not my favorite thing. In fact, I'd have to say, they are pretty much at the bottom of my list.
Trying hard not to freak out - and I don't freak easily - I told my daughter to call "her father" and tell him we had one of his cockroaches in the Jeep with us.
Typical man that he is, he first tried to deny it was his - like I would have somebody else's Madagascar hissing cockroach in the car with me.
Then, because he was getting really irritated with the screaming coming at him out of the phone, he said it must be just a regular cockroach and to "throw it out the window."
I told my daughter to tell him I knew a cockroach from Madagascar when I saw one and it was his.
He said okay, then to "put it in something."
Now did I mention I was driving at fifty miles and hour with two kids in the car?
I said I didn't have anything to put it in. He said to put it in my purse.
Now we get back to number one on my above list. What woman would ever, in her right mind, put a cockroach in her purse?
I finally told him to forget it and I flicked it onto the floor from the seat next to me and figured I'd deal with it when I got to my son's school.
When we arrived there, my daughter (who was as freaked out as I was) and I began looking for said cockroach.
We found a half eaten tomato under the seat (which had apparently rolled under there in a recent grocery trip and explains how the cockroach was able to live).
We threw away the tomato but the cockroach was nowhere to be found.
I spent the next three months - yes, I said THREE months - driving around waiting for him to rear its ugly head.
And guess what? About that time, my husband was vacuuming the Jeep and came into the house looking pretty sheepish.
"Um, I guess you were right, it was my cockroach", he said. The hissing cockroach was still alive and hissing, hidden inside the seat when he pulled it up to vacuum.
So, the cockroach went back to its home at the Science Education Center, I went back to being able to drive without looking around for a really big cockroach, and my husband went back to living in the strange world where men who are biologists live - their own strange bizarro world.
Contact Ellen Priest at 873-9424 ext. 211 or epriest@journalscene.com.