 
Not that flies care about the human condition. They would prefer some good stationary manure to us, no doubt—but apparently, manure lacks sugar. That, science tells us, is why flies find us so attractive: Even when we don’t have watermelon juice on our hands, forearms, faces, and necks, we are sweet to flies. Like your old aunt Mae bearing down on your underchin when you were a tot, flies are saying, “Gimme some sugar.” Flies are also excellent at reproducing. How they do it is something we needn’t go into in detail. As to how they eat—they taste things with the hairs of their feet, okay? Then it gets worse. And they feel fully entitled to do it to our baked beans while we are trying to eat them ourselves. I bit down on a fly once. I can still taste it. A little like motor oil, or axle grease, only very slightly crunchy. Can we find a way to keep them from getting on our nerves? Maybe, just maybe, we need to consider what we and flies have in common. 1. Reproduction. 2. Love of potato salad. 3. Okay, let’s do this. Let’s give flies credit for having just about the most fundamental name in creation. What other animal is called so simply what it does? (Bee doesn’t count.) But come to think of it, that is irritating too. Why wouldn’t a pretty bird be called a fly, and a fly be called something worse, a pester, or something that might derive from the Latin for “tastes with its foot hairs.” That is just like flies, to get away with being called flies. When I was a boy, people put cotton on their screen doors to keep flies away. I didn’t understand that, until I learned that the original idea was to soak the cotton in DDT. These days, restaurants with outdoor dining areas often half fill plastic sandwich bags with water and staple them where flies would bother diners. Supposedly, a fly’s multifaceted eyes pick up reflections from the water that disorient them. I have yet to see flies frantically backpedaling from any of these water bags, but I haven’t seen flies perched on them, either. In fact, I don’t think there are as many flies around as there were years ago. Back in the sixties, a friend of mine went to a Coca-Cola bottling plant on business. The receptionist met him at the door. “You’ll need this,” she said, and handed him a flyswatter. The manager who showed him around carried one too. I doubt that Cokes are bottled amid so many flies anymore. Air-conditioning is a fly’s enemy. Flies like heat. When temperatures drop, they drop, like flies. These days people stay closed up inside their houses, instead of relying on open windows to let breezes in. But let’s not delude ourselves that flies are an endangered species. The only way to feel better about flies is to consider tricks we can play on them. Here is a veritable garden-and-gun anecdote. Around the turn of the twentieth century, Stephen Crane, the author of The Red Badge of Courage, visited Ford Madox Ford, the author of The Good Soldier, at the latter’s cottage in the south of England. Ford tells us that Crane obliged him by planting a rosebush in his garden. And then Crane performed “an enviable trick with a gun. He would put a piece of sugar on a table and sit still till a fly approached. He held in his hand a Smith & Wesson. When the fly was by the sugar, he would twist the gun round with his wrist. The fly would die, killed by the bead sight of the revolver.” It would not have been unlike Ford to make up that story. But I can vouch for the next one. It comes from my own wife. When she was in college her hair was straight and fine and long enough to sit on. A nimble-fingered friend of hers took a single strand of her hair and tied a loop at the end of it. He caught a fly and attached the hair to it. Then he had a fly on a leash. Eventually he gave his pet its freedom, but still trailing the long drifty hair, which must have enabled this fly to provide people—look at the tail on that fly—with a little wonderment for a change. |
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