There’s one thing that has always bothered me about the “little old lady who swallowed a fly” song. (Well, to be honest, there’s lots of things that bother me about that song, but I’m only going to discuss one of them at the moment.) I can understand swallowing the fly (who hasn’t inhaled a bug at some point in their lives?), and I can kind of understand swallowing the spider to catch the fly. Heck, I can maybe even understand swallowing the bird to catch the spider—but the cat? Really? I think at that point most people would just cut their losses and live with the situation. (Or go to the ER.) Or at least, that’s what I used to think, until I saw what happened when my daughter’s boyfriend lost his cellphone inside her room.
The first thing you need to know—and what anyone who has ever been in my daughter, Clementine’s room and lived to tell the tale will tell you—is how easy it is for such a thing to happen. And so, in the beginning, everyone was calm: the boyfriend simply asked to borrow Clementine’s cellphone so he could he could call his; alas, hers was also lost somewhere inside the room. So then he borrowed mine. And promptly lost it. Inside the room. Now, while most people would start to suspect that they were the victim of a malicious poltergeist, and maybe call for an exorcist (or an exterminator), he did neither, and instead borrowed another phone.
I think you can see where this story is going. (Even though, obviously, he couldn’t).
The question, of course, at this point becomes “Exactly how big is her room?” I mean,
to lose that many ringing cellphones, you’d think that you were talking about an area the size of the Bermuda Triangle. Curiously enough, though, by most estimations her room is just a little bit larger than the average walk-in closet. So how, you may ask, is it possible to lose that many phones in a room the size of a Yugo? The answer, unfortunately, is filth.
The sheer volume of filth that fills her room manages to double, triple, and quadruple the amount of surface area to the point where looking for a cellphone in her room is worse than looking for a needle in a haystack. It’s more like looking for a severed head in a landfill. Or at least, it’s equally disgusting. Because what’s the worst thing you’re going to find when you’re going through a haystack? Hay, right? When going through Clementine’s room, hay would be the best case scenario. Worst—and more likely—would be a dead pony, pressed flat between the layers of debris like some kind of grotesque flower. (I saw that on an episode of “Hoarders” once, except it was a cat. Still gross.)
Actually, it was a cat that finally ended up forcing her to clean her room and find the phones. Not a dead one, though. A very much alive one. One that was so alive that it decided to take a dump somewhere in her room. (I found the cat leavings when I was in there looking, unsuccessfully, for the phones myself. And then refused to tell her where it was).
Perhaps it was the last remnants of humanity left inside of her (after fighting against assimilation by the teenage collective), but that ploy actually worked: she cleaned her room, and found the phones. Of course, within days it was filthy again, and things like remotes (and yes, phones) were once more going missing. I considered feeding the cat about a pound of tuna and then locking it in her room to inspire a repeat performance, but was afraid I’d just end up losing the cat.
Come to think of it, maybe I can see the Little Old Lady’s point after all.