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Visits from Vermin

Posted on February 2nd, 2010 by Retired-Ed in Daily Life

OK folks, this one will be a little gross. I was prompted to write this after reading a post from a fellow blogger, Holly Burns. Holly does an absolutely magnificent job  with her blog “Nothing but Bonfires”. She had a recent post about some stories that her mother had told her about some unfortunate happenings in their lives in various countries where they have lived. Check out her writing. I am impressed, but I digress. She told a story about a gigantic cockroach that attacked her mother in Hong Kong. That anecdote prompted my daughter Wendy, who is also a fine writer in her own right, but again I digress, to comment. Wendy wrote about when we lived in a high-rise apartment  building in Seoul, Korea. Our apartment was much like a penthouse overlooking the Han River. As I recall, we had 5 bedrooms and two bathrooms for our family of 4, not including the 6-legged critters that shared our quarters. And there was an occasional 4-legged critter as well.

Wendy wrote of waking up with cockroaches crawling in her bed or on her body. It’s probably a true story, as those cockroaches were everywhere. However, they were smaller than what you’d find in the tropics or sub-tropical climates. But, boy, were they numerous. No matter what I did, we couldn’t get rid of them. When our landlord wanted to raise our rent (even though we had a two-year lease) after one year, I took matters into my own hands, literally.

I bought a bunch of “roach motels”. You remember them and also their commercials on tv, I am sure. “The roaches check in, but they don’t check out.” I placed them in strategic places in the apartment. Then I took just one of them from a bathroom and carried it to the landlord’s manager. I cut open the “motel” to show him the roaches that I had caught in just two days. I counted 72 of them if I remember correctly, and that was just from one room! Nasty place and a nasty landlord too. His comment upon seeing those squirmy insects on this desk was simply, “Ewww!”. I still had to engage an attorney to fight the rent increase. We finally settled out of court for $500. I had to pay him! The cool thing was that the Korea lawyer charged me nothing. I had located him through an American attorney that we knew from our church in Seoul. Because this attorney was a Korean Christian, he was aghast at what was being done to us (or so he said). He said that there would be no fee. My kind of guy! But the landlord was a cockroach with two legs.

Another cockroach story happened when Wendy was just a toddler, about 2 years old, so she wouldn’t have remembered this. We were living on Okinawa at the time, and we had two household pets of the four-legged variety. Two dogs named Bonnie and Clyde (mother and son). I fed them dry dog food normally, which I bought in 50 pound bags. I kept it in the utility room. I used an empty beef stew can to scoop out the food and put it in their dishes. One day, as I was scooping out the food, I felt something crawl up my arm. I thought it was a mouse. I dropped the can and spilled dog food all over the floor. Well, it wasn’t a mouse, but was a cockroach about 4-5 inches long. The damn thing flew at me like a dive bomber. Having studied entomology in school, I am well aware that most insects have wings, including cockroaches, but I really hadn’t seen one fly until then.

Finally,  during one of our first years on Okinawa, back in the late 1970′s, we were undergoing one of our frequent spells of water rationing. If you aren’t familiar with island life, fresh water is often a much-needed commodity. You are surrounded by water, but you can’t drink it, cook with it, or bathe with it. Fresh water comes from the reservoirs which often run dry or nearly so. That precipitates (no pun intended) some form of rationing of fresh water. During this particular stage, our water went off at 8 pm and came back on at 6 am on a daily basis. One morning, the Queen woke up and needed to make a trip to the bathroom. It was about 5 am, and she made the short trek from the bedroom to the john. Then I heard her call me. The Queen wears contact lenses and didn’t have them in at that time; she was wearing her glasses, I suppose, and thought that maybe she wasn’t seeing correctly. When the water went off, you had one flush left in the toilet tank. After that, you had to rely on any water that you might have saved in your bathtub. If you had filled your tub (which totally defeated the purpose of the rationing) you could dip a bucket into the tub and pour the water down the toilet bowl to flush it. Hmm. She saw “something dark” in the bowl and thought that maybe I had left something there and didn’t use the bucket. Nope! After a closer examination, I discovered that the dark thing had four legs and a tail, and was one of the biggest rats I had seen since I worked in a steel mill for US Steel in Gary, Indiana. Those rats were so big, they waddled instead of scurrying.

But what to do? We had already used our one “free” flush. I took the dog in there with me in hopes that she could scare the life out of the rat. Didn’t happen. But wonder of wonders, for some reason the water got turned on early that morning. You’d hear the air being flushed out of the pipes as the water came on. Once the toilet tank filled up, I tried a flush. Bye-bye rat. Good riddance. Can you imagine what could have happened if the Queen hadn’t looked before she sat?

An odd sequel to that story is how far gossip can travel. Of course, we told that story to our friends. One Thanksgiving about 2 years later, we hosted two teachers from my school for Thanksgiving dinner. One of them was a young woman who later got a transfer to Germany. Several years after that, I had been promoted to principal of a small school in Korea, and I had a teacher at the school (a transferee from Germany) who had been friends with the young woman who had been our Thanksgiving guest. We were friends with our new teacher and her husband and socialized frequently. One evening as we were telling our usual lies to each other (teacher stories are like war stories, but not like fairy tales.  Fairy tales start off with “Once upon a time”, whereas war stories and teacher stories start off with “This is no bullshit!”) We were treated to the story of how some woman in Okinawa almost sat on a rat who was swimming in her toilet. Imagine her surprise when the Queen said, “I was that woman!” Always good for a laugh.

That completes my vermin stories, and as I look out the window, I see that it has started to snow again. I am really getting tired of this. Could someone send a few hundred tons of road salt to my village, please?

Retired-Ed

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