He was a big man, tall and powerfully built, and he was very angry. I was 11 years old, and alone with him. I had never seen him like that before.
He was slapping himself on the arm, hard, angry slaps, and he was vocalizing. Not words but their nonverbal equivalents. He was grunting and growling. The offending wasp finally hit the ground, but the man wasn’t finished with it. He began stomping on it with his large boots, and kept this up for some time, all the while still vocalizing his anger at the painful sting. I knew it hurt, because already in my few years I had been stung by a variety of bees a number of times, once by four of them in my ankles after I stepped into a hive hidden by a pile of leaves. I had heard that wasp stings were worse. A half-hour later he came back to the sliver of the wasp’s corpse and stomped it again several times, for good measure.
I was both amazed at the sight and, I must admit, a wee bit amused. How many times can you smash-kill a wasp.
I knew the man by his name, Happy. Happy Hughes. I loved being around him. Continue reading “Happy”
