A cricket is no ordinary insect. It is large and brazen and possesses boundless energy. Indeed, it is basically a skeletal puppy. And for the last several days, one has inhabited my apartment.
This presents a problem.
While I do possess a great many talents, patience and fast reflexes are not two of them. This puts me at a clear disadvantage when hunting down a cricket. I think it senses my weakness. Three times last night, as I sat reading in my study, the cricket walked up to my feet and calmly looked up at me, displaying either a complete lack of understanding of the threat of a stomping shoe or – as I chose to perceive it – a profound measure of hubris. A matter of opinion, I suppose.
Because the cricket is capable of jumping so far and so fast, I find myself terrified that it will jump up the leg of my shorts and do what I’ve attempted to do for decades: cling to my manhood. Thus, when anywhere near a cricket, I place one hand around my crotch. So it was that last night I found myself racing around my bedroom with one hand holding a shoe above my head and the other clasped firmly to Captain Weatherbee. Admittedly, this is not entirely unprecedented.
“Come on, Jiminy!” I called toward the cricket and, sounding like an exasperated Scooby Doo villain, added, “I’ll get you yet!”
As I chased the cricket around the apartment, I began to think of the original Jiminy Cricket and the movie Pinocchio for the first time since my childhood. Disney movies have a habit of appearing innocent during one’s youth and quite differently during adulthood. Snow White, after all, was about a woman who awoke in the woods to find herself surrounded by seven behatted midgets. Though the plot of this movie can now be found in various forms for $19.95 on the world wide web, it was at the time an original. Pinocchio was no different.
Essentially what happens in Pinocchio is that a stylish cricket walks into an elderly, Italian man’s woodshop, finds that the man is fashioning a marionette, and watches as the man prays for the wooden puppet to become a real boy, purportedly for innocent reasons. Soon a blue fairy arrives and turns the puppet into a boy, after which he meets a series of questionable characters before saving the old man and the cricket from a whale. Also, his nose grows when he lies. It’s like Disney got high and played Mad Libs.
I wondered, though, if perhaps I was misunderstanding my own cricket. After all, could he not be cut from the same cloth as Jiminy? Perhaps all he wanted was to dress like an aristocrat and steer me in a moral direction. So, when next I spotted it – seated casually on my coffee table – I approached it with an open mind. “Hello, dear cricket,” I told it, though the hand that remained on Mr. Weatherbee betrayed my front of bravery. “My name is Peter Digglewink. What’s yours?”
The cricket, however, sat silently and only glared at me, as if to say “What, Jew?” Crickets, you see, are exceedingly antisemitic.
As Mr. Weatherbee and I retired to my study for the evening, I could not help but think back over my relationship with the cricket. Indeed, it proved a worthy foe. And so, as I drifted off to sleep, I preferred to think that it was its own hubris that felled him rather than my very large bottle of Raid and repeated stomping on its corpse. A matter of opinion, I suppose.
Digglewink's World 
