Of Fleas and Flies
When Thomas was a kid in early grade school, he would come over to stay with me and we would often work together on writing projects. I don’t know if he liked doing it because he is a natural writer or if he just wanted to mimic me, but he still writes a bit, so I like to think he at least enjoyed it. I think it was while I owned the apartment in Gramercy Park area (technically East 22nd Street) that was an old duplex brewery building with hundred-year-old huge wood beams. It was a fun loft apartment with a catwalk and everything. One night we needed to have him find, memorize and analyze a poem for some sort of assignment. Like all kids, he was into homework efficiency. The good news was that he was diligent in feeling he had to do his assignment. The less good news was that he wanted a short and fun poem, please, and wanted help finding one.
This was in 2002-4, so he must have been in about Third or Fourth Grade at Little Red School in the West Village. The internet is a beautiful thing and it makes light research a breeze. We very quickly landed on Ogden Nash, one of the great Twentieth Century American poets of short and light-hearted verse. What I liked the most about Ogden Nash, a Harvard matriculant who quickly dropped out, was his sense of humor. He didn’t take himself or life too seriously, which is always a good thing. He said about his early life in New York City, “Came to New York to make my fortune as a bond salesman and in two years sold one bond—to my godmother. However, I saw lots of good movies.” You just gotta love a guy like that even though he probably had a nice Nash family trust fund to lean on. All the better that he could be so fun-loving nonetheless.
Ogden Nash dashed off over 500 short poems in his lifetime and almost seemed to aspire to limit his expression to the shortest verses that could still tell the tale and raise a chuckle. He wrote a poem of two lines only called The Cow that went like this:
The cow is of the bovine ilk;
One end is moo, the other, milk
What else needs to be said about a cow? Economy of effort, economy of verse and lots of efficiency and fun to boot.
For some reason that shortest of Nash poems didn’t suit Thomas, who probably couldn’t get past a complicated word like ilk. So we kept looking Googling short and fun as the operative characteristics of the poem we were searching for. Then we found the Ogden Nash poem that I had remembered and always enjoyed for its sing-song turn-of-phrase. I don’t know exactly when he wrote the poem and don’t really care, but it had to be mid-century as so many great things like all those houses in Palm Springs, ones that probably have flues for some reason or other. That would be his poem A Flea and a Fly in a Flue, which makes little or no sense except in its rhyme.
A flea and a fly in a flue
Were imprisoned, so what could they do?
Said the fly, “let us flee!”
“Let us fly!” said the flea.
So they flew through a flaw in the flue.
First of all, do fleas and flies hang out together. I sort of doubt it since they would seem to be mostly competitors for the same food sources. Fleas hang out on dogs and flies buzz around the heads of water buffalos and such. And why would they ever find themselves in a flue? That implies they were indoors, which is certainly possible for either species, so I guess if there was fan that sucked them into the flue that would make sense. My understanding of flies and fleas (admittedly I have more experience with flies than fleas) is that that they desperately want to be indoors, but then as soon as the sun shines through a window, they just as desperately went to get back out. That is often to no avail as my major experience with flies occurs with them buzzing all across a window, hopelessly trying to get the hell out.
Therefore, I can imagine a fly saying, “let’s get the hell out of here”, but I suspect it would be to another fly more than to a bothersome flea that is probably much smaller than him and buzzes at a considerably different buzz rate, assuming fleas even buzz at all. My image of fleas (totally fictitious I’m sure) is that fleas are very calm compared to frenetic flies. The calculating flea that finds a comfortable life on the neck of some dog seems very at peace with its life I imagine. If he does dismount for some reason, I suppose he might be open to suggestion from a fly, but I sort of doubt it. I’m thinking that he more likely would say something like, “Buzz off you annoying fly”, but I will accept “Let us fly” as a concise version of the same sentiment.
Flaws probably do occur regularly in flues, but one would hope not and certainly not expect them to be prevalent since flues’ sole function in life is to efficiently pass air from ores to another, most like towards the out of doors. To do that for smoke, which is the most oft-used purpose of a flue, requires that it be more or less airtight. That suggests that flaws in flues are not common or if they are evident, they are very small or they would otherwise get repaired by the homeowner. That means that given the relative size of flies and fleas (flies are at least .125” in length whereas fleas are generally about .05” in length…though flies tend to be slimmer and fleas prefer the more bulbous shape). Maybe that is the real answer to this conundrum that I’m sure Ogden Nash contemplated in his spare time while he clipped his Nashly municipal coupons. The width of the smaller flea is not so different from the width of the otherwise larger fly, so they may just have found common purpose in finding and exploiting the flaw in the flue. That may well solve the mystery of why the fly and flea chose to fly through the same flaw in the flue.
In case you are wondering, I am writing this in the Escondido Mercedes service waiting room where all the other Mercedes-owning population of Escondido are hanging out on this first business day of 2022 at 10am waiting for their cars to be serviced in the new year. What made me think about this was all the new year COVID Omicron talk on the radio. It made me think that COVID seems to now have become the equivalent of what the flu was for many years to me. It was something you would rather not get, but which would surprise you when you learned that so many older people with vulnerabilities would fall prey to it and die. I don’t know that the COVID numbers are yet down to run-of-the-mill seasonal flue mortality rates, but it seems to be trending that way.
So let’s hope that this flu flies through a flaw of its own making by mutating itself into a normalized if not great place.