the sieve and the sand

There once was this grasshopper who lived in one of the suburbs outside Kansas City.

He had a neighbor, an ant, whom he let talk him into commuting with him every day into the city to go to work to get more money.

The grasshopper had said he and his family were just fine. They lived within their means. They didn’t have a car or a big TV and all the fancy do-dads like all the hit new long-playing records or a spanking new high-tech hoity-toity eight-track player or Atari, but they were happy and didn’t have to struggle. They had fun sitting around in the yard making their own music. It was a simple life, he said, but a darn good one. But the ant convinced him to go to work, to give his family a better life, he said.

The ant snickered. “Oh, grasshopper.” He shook his head in disapproval. “Only stupid birds make their own music these days. It’s just noise. The real music’s all been recorded. It’s only music if someone famous is singing.”

Maybe the ant was right.

“You’ve got to think about tomorrow. You’ve got to get with the times. It’s all about hard work and gumption,” the ant advised his friend. “Your family depends on you.”

To get to work, the grasshopper needed a car, so the grasshopper’s family went from needing no car to needing three because the sixteen-year-old needed a car–an old beater sufficed–and as long as everyone else was going to have one the wife needed a car to go shopping out in St. Louis because the shopping’s always better in a different city. She grew tired of familiar old KC.

Well anyway that grasshopper he worked hard and moved up and life got more expensive by the year. There were bills for the telephone, car insurance, car payments, a second mortgage, a boat they decided they needed for family weekends on the lake, even though they only made it out there once or twice in a summer. There was college to think about, too. Plus, Billy, the oldest, was a hellraiser, always speeding in his car and drinking and driving, occasionally getting arrested, always needing money for various things like paying off his bookie or buying smokes. He suffered from a deep anomie.

It had been many years now since the family had gathered in the yard to make music.

The grasshoppers had always been an old-fashioned family. For a long time Sally, the grasshopper’s wife, was able to stay home and look after the children. They played games and such. On rare off-times, she was able to catch up on housework or her studies. She was teaching herself Spanish and French! As living costs outstripped wages in their city, however, she was compelled to seek employment as well and found work at a hair salon, where she earned just enough money to pay for child care. As the children grew older, they no longer needed child care, but instead they needed school supplies, and the food bills grew because they ate like pigs, not grasshoppers, and soon enough they all needed first cars, too, but beaters no longer sufficed because all their friends had brand new cars.

Automobiles were nothing compared to the weddings! Sally kept churning out females, who were more expensive because the woman’s family paid for the wedding. It was enough to make the parents hope they’d grow up to be spinsters, lesbians, or nuns.

The grasshopper worked at a plant that manufactured garden tools, and he was a member of a union, which ensured he received relatively fair wages. Well one day his company got fed up paying relatively fair wages and decided to move all its operations overseas to Bangladesh or Vietnam, some place that offered cheaper labor. Where did the grasshopper’s company go? The grasshopper didn’t care, so why should you? All that mattered to him was that he was flat on his ass, so to speak. Thirty years the grasshopper had worked there and now nothing! No pension. No job. No hope of getting a new job because he was too old and didn’t have proper training. He didn’t have any health insurance, and he was sick, and his wife was sick, and now his oldest son was into methamphetamines, so there was more money down the drain through bail and loans and rehab, which never seemed to work.

The other children did better for themselves; at least they stayed off the meth (or trailer park candy as it was called by upscale folks). They were all going to college! The children of a worker would study alongside all the snooty middle-class insects like ladybugs and butterflies. But they would all leave university and head into the world thirty-thousand dollars in debt, to say nothing of the credit cards.

The grasshopper and the ant had a talk one day while they were out mowing their lawns; in fact, they took a break from mowing so they could talk. All their neighbors laughed at them behind their backs. Nobody mowed his own lawn anymore!

The grasshopper said, “I shouldn’t have listened to you all those years ago. I’ve worked hard all my life and have nothing to show for it except some cars and a stupid boat and a mountain of credit card debt. I’m in the same position I was then, except now it’s worse because we’ve all forgotten how to make music. If we had continued to live within our means, we would have gotten by just fine, and the neighborhood would be happier for hearing our beautiful music every day.”

The ant said, “I am willing to concede that you may have been technically right all along, grasshopper, but you were wrong to be right, and I was right to be wrong.”

The grasshopper died a few years later and, like his neighbor the ant, didn’t leave his family shit.

(Note to parents who are not encouraging their children to cuss: if you wish to read this fable to your children, feel free to amend the final word to “squat,” and “ass” can become “back” or “rear” or whatever you want. “Hellraiser” is probably fine, but do as you please.)