July 2: Fred the earthworm

How cool is this? Yesterday, we went to my sister's house for a hot dog barbecue to celebrate Canada Day. We played a game called Telestrations, which is just about the most fun I've had playing a board game. How it works is you have this flip binder and you are assigned a word. You write that word on page 1 and then you give the binder to the person on your left. They look at the word on page 1 and draw a picture of it on page 2. Then they give the binder to the person on their left, who looks at the picture on page 2 and writes down what they think it is on page 3. Then that person passes the binder to the person on their left, and you get the idea?

One of my words wound up being "Can of Worms." My binder made the gauntlet, becoming bucket of worms and ultimately morphed into a campfire or a lawnmower or something like that. My dad's binder was the best. He started with "French Onion Soup" and somehow that became "Electrocution." Most of us laughed until we cried. If we were to analyze things more closely, we'd come to the conclusion that we were laughing at the very real phenomenon that everything we encounter is prone to the most subjective of interpretations.

And help me please? When I learned that my title today is Fred the Earthworm, I couldn't help but think of that game I so enjoyed last night. 

And how funny that I encountered real life earthworms earlier on this week. Mom asked kiddo and I if we'd help move some firewood from beside the garage to a hutch she'd built to shield it from the elements. This we did, upsetting whole colonies of grubs and bugs and daddy long legs and earthworms. Oh yes, there are civilizations in the soil of your backyard.

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So let's talk about Fred the Earthworm, who found himself in a chicken coop. Fred was sore afraid for he knew that chickens like to peck at the ground and that many of them eat earthworms like him. Luckily for Fred, the chickens in this particular hen house all got lots of corn to eat. Basically, the chickens kind of walked around all day and said "bok bok" and pecked at the ground and lay eggs and got their heads cut off so they could be turned into Kentucky Fried Chicken.

But Fred was not eaten by any chicken. This is because Fred had the temerity to stay outside the chicken wire fence, which was doing its job of keeping the chickens inside one defined area. Since the coop was inside and, therefore, closed to birds, Fred didn't have to worry about winding up in the belly of a raven or an oriole or a blue jay, which looks like this:

Secret to my success? Earthworm diet, baby.

 

Oh, I slay me.

No, seriously, a real blue jay looks like this:

I have seen blue jays at Cooper Marsh, which is a sort of nature conservatory near where I live. I always try to get a picture of them whenever they land on a twig. Unfortunately, birds always fly off a split second before I'm able to pull the trigger. I'm an amateur photographer and the camera I use has this massive telephoto lens that takes about five years to autofocus. Blue jays don't have time for that. They have ball games to win and earthworms to eat (not Fred though.)

Here is a bird picture I managed to take at Cooper Marsh:

If you squint just right and turn up your brightness, you can see him.

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Editor's note: I am being told that the family is embarking on a trip to Heritage Park and so I must wrap this note up. Here goes:

Fred survived the encounter in the chicken coop. He feasted on some corn, chicken turds, and phosphorous in the soil. Later, he dug his way back into the Earth, where he married another earthworm named Matilda and they had 173 worms whose names I won't reveal here. I will, however, say that one of them was Thor the Worm, whose exploits in the Granola Riots of 2031 were legendary but, of course, that is a tale for another day.