Where butterflies go to do their business

Phone rings.

“Hey.”

K: “Hey!”

“How’s it going, babe?”

“It’s really slow. Nobody is here. You should come in and let me clean out your ears.”

“Right now?”

“We got this New Thing and I want to be the first to try it out. On you.”

“Well, uh, I sort of needed to practice some more……. Um, ok.”

As I am driving to the clinic, I see some unfortunate guy meandering down the sidewalk shouting jeezus-knows-what to nobody in particular. Maybe his problems started years ago when someone used a New Thing to scoop the wax from his ears.

Amelia and I walk into the clinic, and enter the urgent care facility through the side door. There’s Nurse K, looking all hot in her smocks.

“You’ll need to register and check in, babe.”

“I thought I could just walk in and have this done without having to go through a whole thing.” (In other words, “I thought I was Speshul.”)

K, smiling, anxious to start the digging: “Oh, it’ll just take a minute.”

Present insurance card. Fill out form. It’s illegible. Doesn’t matter. Place form in basket. Wait. Why am I waiting? There’s no one else here. I just saw at least two doctors and three nurses and no patients on the other side of that door. What are they doing back there? Team huddle? Prayer circle? World of Warcraft?

I had a minute to think. Somewhere in that minute, it dawned on me that maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. What exactly is this new device, anyway? My imagination conjured up a Matirx-esque brain tap entering my skull through my ear. Why don’t I think about these things before I agree to be the lab rat? Here I am, Mr. Skeptic, putting my ears on the line for the benefit of medical science without question. Bow my head and say ‘Yes’.

Sigh, The things I do to enable K’s penchant for picking stuff.

Fast forward to the examining room. This new, amazing device was basically a squirt bottle with a thin straw. A clear disk was fastened near the end of the tube, apparently designed to keep an exuberant operator from poking through the subject’s eardrum and into the brain. K started squirting stuff in my ears. It was mostly bearable. At times it felt like my eardrum was getting sandblasted. No big deal. I wondered if using a can of Dust-Off would be just as effective, though quite a bit colder.

Amelia: “What are you doing, mama?”

“Cleaning the butterfly poop out of daddy’s ears.”

Giggle, “Butterfly poop, butterfly poop, butterfly poop.”

The last time I had this done, the doc pulled out so much butterfly poop it affected the high frequencies of my hearing. Just great. Now all of my horns will sound too bright, which will trigger a new round of mouthpiece and reed searching. Maybe that’s what drove the dude crazy–he never found the right reed. I would believe it.

I got dizzy and felt like I might puke, and I eventually gave birth to two pea-sized butterfly turds.

Everyone was a winner. My hearing seems pretty much the same, so my mouthpiece drawer will remain untouched for now. K got her pick fix for now. And Amelia enjoyed a field trip to Mommy’s work and learned all about butterfly feces.

There is nothing in the caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly.
Whatever.