Snakes - The Great Generational Divide

Both Daniel and Madeleine like to ask me about my most and least favorites in various categories - their supply of topics for this classification seem to be endless.  In fact, they like me to number them - especially Madeleine:  What's your favorite color?  What's your second-favorite color?  What's your third-favorite color?  And on.  

Once you get as old as me, all of this introspection and cataloging gets difficult.  I don't spend much time thinking about what I like and don't like, not to mention the first several placings for each category.  I know what things I like and I eat them; I know what I don't like, and I avoid it - mostly involving work.  But I have a hard time probing the extremes of my enthusiasms and antipathy; getting through each day places its own demands on my mental life...

But when Madeleine asked me about my least favorite animal, I didn't hesitate.  I don't like the least-favorite questions; I don't want to broadcasts, and potentially pass on, my neurotic or whimsical little dislikes...  But when Madeleine asked me what's my least-favorite animals, it was a no-brainer:  Snakes!

 I was very surprised by her reaction:  "Snakes?  Really?  Why???!"
 
I tend to assume that everybody must fear-and-loath snakes.  But not everybody is the product of my own, uniquely neurotic, Celtic Bostonian upbringing.  Snakes constitute a hallmark of the Great Generational Divide, along with bats, which - of course - the children love, because, believe it or not, they're apparently cute.  I opted not to explain why I hate snakes ("Because they bite you and you die, of course!"), but rather to act - and I do mean act - as if I myself couldn't possibly imagine why I'm not extremely fond of these wonderful, slithery little woodland friends.  No reason to pass on the damage!

But the Snakes Question keeps manifesting itself.  Of course, there's the famous snake-in-the-bulkhead story (like the bizarre motion picture "Snakes on a Plane" - a movie made for my generation, rather than hers).  When we all - and I do mean all - saw a tiny little garter snake in the bulkhead a couple of years ago - sorry if I'm repeating myself, which I am - Amy screamed, I jumped back, Madeleine said, with pleasure, "Oh - a snake!"; Ian wanted to pick it up, and Daniel wanted me to put it in a plastic bin, which he brought me, so we could keep it as a pet.  Something similar happened again a couple of weeks ago.  Ian told me the story:

They saw a snake.  I guess I wasn't home, but everyone else was.  Amy believed that it was poisonous - perhaps with her very occasional little bout of alarmism.  Professor Ian did some subsequent research and reported back that there's only one kind of snake which is poisonous in New Hampshire, namely the rattle snake.  (I heard on the radio yesterday that five people a year die of rattle-snake bites in the U.S.  Old fogies like me would likely say - "Five!  How can we avoid being one of them?!!!" and younger, rational people would probably say "Five in 300 million...")

So Ian did what any scientist would - he went off to get Mommy's phone-otherwise-known-as-a-camera, so that he could get a picture of it and figure out whether it is truly poisonous.  But as his story continues, Daniel started prodding the creature with a stick, while Madeleine helped Ian in his research.  Ian was very sad to report that by the time he got back from his scientific inquiry, the snake had left - I think it was Madeleine that came to tell him the sad news.  Needless to say, I'm amazed, if not impressed, with Daniel's reaction to the snake; it would never occur to me to engage, with a snick, something which I'm quite sure is on this planet to bite-and-kill me.  Just the slithering by itself makes me want to run, screaming...

But the very best part of the story is Ian's parenthetical mention of what he had actually been planning to do with the snake, had it not escaped Daniel's stick-session and gone back into the wild:  Ian had wanted to pet it, keep it for a pet, and maybe teach it to do some tricks.

Almost as entertaining is Ian's ultimate commentary on the lethality question:  looking back, following his online research, he is richly amused by Mommy's identification of the great killer-viper in none other than the common garter snake.

(August, 2015)