worms, pigeons, bats, and beehives

It's Halloween, and I'm thinking about worms. Not the maggot-type things we sometimes call 'worms' - but earthworms. The house in central Texas was situated on dry, limey, hard-crusted soil and crumbled limestone. Semi-arid climate - the native grasses and shrubs had to be pretty hardy and drought-resistant. Though we had earthworms in the moist lovely crumbly dark soil of Louisiana, I never really looked at earthworms until I saw them at work in our back yard in Texas.

Three or four inches long, they traveled through the upper layer of earth (only a few inches deep) by swallowing the dirt in front of them and moving forward, letting it pass through their bodies out the other end. You could tell where they had passed because the dirt was more crumbly, and it consisted of cylindrical segments the size of what would have exited a worm's body. The earthworms tilled the soil!

Today I was driving and I wished I had a camera. There was a huge elegant ad for Rolex watches with a large image of a gleaming watch. Above the watch, perched on the structure of the billboard, were 7 pigeons, and something about the homey little birds and the giant fancy watch amused me.

I had the radio on, picking up a Baton Rouge station playing 'classic oldies'. I passed a restaurant with a flashing electronic sign advertising their menu and specials and oops, a large Halloween bat appeared on the sign, flashing off and on to the rhythm of the song playing in the car: 'Another One Bites the Dust'.

I was almost home when somehow I got to thinking about beehives. Not the residences for bees, and not the musical, but the hairstyle popular in the late 1950s, early 1960s. You held a strand of hair by its tip, and with a comb, you 'teased' or 'ratted' it into an airy nest, which you shaped like a beehive and held in place with bobby pins and lots and lots of sticky hairspray. They made a person look like a conehead (aliens popularized on Saturday Night Live a decade or two later). I remember a girl just out of high school getting into a vehicle, and the top of her beehive squashing against the ceiling of the car. As a little kid, I was impressed, but not envious.