slouka

When I was young, my parents read me Aesop's fable of "The Ant and the Grasshopper," wherein, as everyone knows, the grasshopper spends the summer making music in the sun while the ant toils with his fell formicidae. Ievitably, winter comes, as winter will, and the grasshopper, who hasn't planned ahead and who doesn't know what a 401K is, has run out of luck. When he shows up at the ants' door, carrying his fiddle, the ant asks him what he was doing all year. "I was singing, if you please," the grasshopper replies, or something to that effect. "You were singing?" asks the ant. "Well, then, go and sing." And perhaps because I sensed, even then, that fate would someday find me holding a violin or a manuscript at the door of the ants, my antennae frozen and my bills overdue, I confounded both Aesop and my well-meaning parents, and bore away the wrong moral. That summer, many a windblown grasshopper was saved from the pond, and many an anthill inundated under the golden rain of my pee. (Mark Slouka, "Quitting the Paint Factory: On the virtues of idleness" in Harper's Magazine, November 2004, p. 57)