Killing Pests

I have been growing roses in this cool climate for many years. About two years ago, whether because of climate change or just migration, we were invaded by Japanese beetles, beautiful little animals with coppery wings and regular white and black dots all around.

They eat roses just when they blossom, especially the lighter-coloured ones. Nothing seems to work against them: a master gardener suggested the systemic Bayer once-a-year insecticide, which you pour into the earth around the bush just as the leaves come out. I used it. The first beetles I saw, in late June, just fell off the leaves. But after a few weeks, they consumed all the pink and lavender and multicolour roses.

La mi mujer felt my frustration: so much work, so much care, so much love, all gone to feed the beasties. She suggested I go out morning and evening with a tub of soapy water and drown the beetles. And so I did, faithfully, until medical matters diverted my attention.

I had to justify to myself the drowning. Not so much the systemic insecticide, but the highly personal killing I was undertaking. And I have not been able to do so. I have told myself these creatures, however beautiful, are destroying my property, which I have struggled to make beautiful, which I have loved and tended. And then I think, incongruously I admit, of all the genocides of the past century, and how they were rationalised by comparing the victims to a plague, to pests, to an infection.

Then there is the occasional bat. Bats are mostly 'protected species,' and we are not allowed to kill them. How one can tell them they should go away and scare (or infect) other homes is more than I know. And so they get in, one or two each summer. How they do is unknown also, but they can fit through a gap no more than a centimetre wide by folding their skeletons around their backbone.

Last month la mujer saw one flapping about the dining room, and out we ran into our backyard, and left the door open hoping the thing would fly out. It didn't, but apparently another one flew in.

So I called a friend who has an air pistol and has accounted for more mice than has his cat. He came over with two such weapons and we searched the house from Wednesday to Whitsuntide and saw no bats. It (or they) had escaped.

A few years ago I caught a bat, with the help of a robust friend. We took it outside and killed it. And after the fury of the event, I asked myself again why I wanted to condemn an entire race, a species. Why did I need to find in them something so fundamentally hateful as to justify their destruction?

Is it beyond reason to think that the effort to think of both these kinds of pests as contamination, as unclean, is just a bit reminiscent of the efforts of the worst of humanity to make Europe 'clean' of, for example, Jews?


Alex

The Three Sweetest Words

My daugher is strikingly beautiful. At one point, while rehearsing for a performance of the Crucible, her director gave her an exercise for showing a character being alert and happy. She should imagine herself as a doctor just going in to tell an anxious patient, 'It's not cancer.'

I heard those words, or a message which added up to them.

There are always 'possibles,' and 'maybes,' and 'look again,' but the answer is still the one which restores one to life--which however routine or conventional, is deep and alluring and full of promise.

Alex

Shadows

When I was small people watched soap operas without embarrassment. Whenever the almost-banal bad news that the character had cancer was announced, it was preceded by the doc telling him or her that he had seen 'shadows' on the x-ray. I have no idea if x-rays of the period really showed 'shadows,' or if this was just a piece of TV mystification, or MD mystification. But it worked: it conveyed a ghostly and ominous presence in one's body.

I had some 'shadows,' of some sort on a CT scan of my lungs a few days ago, and tomorrow morning I will have a bronchoscopy to try to determine if one of the two is malignant. (The other may be too small to reach with the instrument.) The doc, and the books I read, tell me the likelihood is very small that the one in my right lung is anything but a more or less insignificant 'broncholith,' while the one in the other lung is also tiny and seems to arise from a scar first observed years ago when I smoked tobacco. But there is such a thing as scar carcinoma....

It's going to be hard to go to sleep tonight. I'd like to think that the procedure, preceded by local anaesthetic and then by midazolam and fentanyl, will not be awful: in fact, I may not feel anything at all. It is the pathology, of course, which troubles me most. A single malignancy which is small and has not invaded even adjacent lymph nodes is not awful: it can be removed with little loss of lung function (but many years of worry afterwards). The real killer (pardon the pun) is if the little shadow above the scar in the other lung is also malignant--and worst if it is the same kind of malignancy which I hope they do not find in my right lung. In that case I think I review my will very quickly and consider how I might spend a foreshortened life.

I never expected any of this of course. I have lived into middle age without any particular illness, which is itself a grace. And now my friends are all sending good words, and my best friend, who is vastly overworked, came to spend an hour or more this evening to divert me from my anxiety.

My brother in Tel Aviv said the 'Mi-sheberakh' prayer for me this past Saturday in synagogue. It invokes G-d who blessed our ancestors and asks him to bless the person in peril. I knew he was going to do so, and I'd like to think I felt the benefit flowing into me.

I will be back with more news when I have it. May the Power who controls the universe give me, and all those whom I love and all who read this message, good health and long and useful life.

Alex