The Secret Life of Bees

Emily made a housework proposal to me a few weekends ago, which I gleefully accepted. Our feeding routine, for years, has been: I feed the teeming hordes in the morning, she feeds them at dinnertime. Ideally, this occurs on the sixes, but if the aminals had their way, it'd be more like 3.

Now that she's back in school and needs to get up early anyway, she offered to trade me five tasks for two: she'd do all the weekday feedings (subject to availability) if I dealt with the weekends, morning and night. Seems I was waking her up with my routine, so better if she just did it.  This has worked out beautifully on the mornings the lunks don't all come and wake me up anyway, but it also led to some amazing discoveries as I did the rounds both times yesterday and again this morning:

Our cellar is breeding a bloated, incoherent form of bumblebees.

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I'd found dead ones down there at various times earlier in the year, which I assumed had hitched lifts with the assorted plants that Eleanor winters in the greenhouse section of the cellar. These buggers, on the other hand, are, at best, Mostly Dead- and on at least two occasions have chosen cat food receptacles as their places of demise. (One was in Michelle's bowl last night, the other in an empty can near their feeding area the previous morning.)

We suspect they're getting in through the dryer vent, and are being carbon monoxided to near-death as they take that route. Each of them, so far, has received a fragile return trip to the outside world, usually after shoveling each into the empty cat fud can and then covering it momentarily with the peeled-off lid, just to keep from getting stung. (The one from last night was still conscious enough to let off some serious protests in there until I returned Buzzy safely to the outside ground.)

My late mother and sister are spinning in their graves as I write this, since both were petrified of bees. Don't worry, though; I promise never to take it THIS far:

"" (Watch on YouTube)

It was 90 minutes and 30 years ago. Both.

My high school years weren't much for the books- at least not for the yearbook. I did the geeky things: band, newspaper, school magazines, Honor Society. I'd have been stuffed into lockers if I hadn't been six feet tall by the time I was 15. 

In those primordial politically correct days, though, there was the one activity the yearbook wasn't allowed to mention: MYF. Though we laughingly referred to it as "Meet Your Flake," it was actually the Methodist Youth Fellowship which I joined in my freshman year (while still, technically, a junior high 9th grader) and continued in, as a participant and eventually president, for all of my high school years. These were the truest of true friends, who I spent virtually every Sunday night with, along with many a retreat and youth gathering and Ovnoc (our palindroming of "Convo," an areawide Methodist youth convocation which continues to this very day). Our World War II-era parents were moving away and falling away, so the church itself stopped growing in those years, but we countered that by inviting, and welcoming, all of our friends of every belief- Lutheran, Catholic, even Jewish. By my senior year, we were dozens strong and committed to our faith and to each other. Sunday nights were the most important times of the week, when we got to decide what was important to do, and say, and be.

Then, college broke up that old gang of mine, and I never found quite the same connection with church people for well over 20 years. In time, Emily made the decision to be confirmed, but then also had to decide whether to continue in active participation. I've always believed that she should have the same chance I did to find that way herself, so for eighth through tenth grades, she was a very occasional participant, never in the activities of the youth group.

Then God/Fate/Time/Whatever intervened.

A minister asked me to help fix some stuff on the youth leader's computer. Checking internet connections made me need to bring up SOMETHING, and rather than show off something as heinous as this blog, I pulled up the site where Em displays her artwork. (Email me if you're interested; I just don't want to put the address out there for the world at large.) Among her work there is a t-shirt design that she created through CafePress as a school service project to support the local SPCA. Our youth leader oohed, and ahhed, and chanced to mention that the youth group has been trying to get a t-shirt designed for years. Would she, could she, possibly be interested?

She was, and would, and a week ago tonight, she went to the group's first meeting of the year, on a no-obligation, no-minister-will-call basis to sketch out a basic design for the thing. They loved it, and just as important, she loved them- and decided on the spot that she wanted to be a part of the group for her final two years of high school.

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Then came another call. Or calling, perhaps.

Our congregation was way ahead of the curve in developing a "safe sanctuary" policy for all aspects of our church in which adults interact with kids. The basic tenets are (1) there must always be two adults present, preferably of opposite sexes, whenever kids are involved, and (2) all of those adults need to be trained, and even background-checked, to be sure the twosome is an appropriate one. I'd already learned of these rules when I agreed to work with the confirmation kids, but they became even more pressing when our youth leader's male counterpart suddenly announced that his grad-school commitments would keep him from being Adult Number Two for most of the Sunday night meetings.

Would I, could I be that person, at least for this suddenly open week?

At first, I had to say no. I had That Trial to prepare for, beginning tomorrow. Yet as soon as that settled, I knew what call had to be made, to let them know that I could make it to keep the group going for at least another week. And so it is, I have just returned from my first MYF meeting in more than 30 years.

The comfy sofas are the same. The free-form artwork on the walls, likewise. There's not as much of a musty smell, but that's because this group meets in the church rafters versus mine which was resigned to the church basement. The wide eyes of enthusiasm, and the lack of cynicism, and the genuine love for God and for each other, though? Just like I remember it. They want to save the world, and cure cancer, and fast for 30 hours for another worthy cause, and return to Appalachia to rebuild homes- all between their incredibly full (in comparison to Emily's, and especially in comparison to my) school and secular activity schedules.

They ended with a silly game, much like the [damn, Dennis, can you remember the name of it?] board game we got hooked on playing down there for the last two years of the Ford administration, and then with a devotion which used song and prayer and togetherness in the same way we always did.

Part of me feels like I never left. And while I can't be their co-leader every week, I will do everything in my heart and head to make sure they are not forced to disband on account of adult indifference.