I’d like to tell you about Marvin.
He was a palo verde beetle.
I was afraid of palo verde beetles. I was even more unnerved when I found out, in the middle of a crowded Circle K, that they could fly. Directly at your head.
My dog, a small and mighty wiener dog named Claude, would see one on the patio and bark — not so much at the insect intruder as away from it. He was chased by a bug. In Claude’s defense, he was about 8 inches tall and those bugs are huge.
But back to Marvin — back to before Marvin was Marvin.
I’d sit outside a lot in the evening, and I’d watch him from afar, as he toodled around on the broken asphalt, doing whatever it is palo verde beetles do when they’re on the job. And yes, I am aware that the part of Marvin may have been played by an understudy or two.
One night, he was crossing the driveway, I’m assuming oblivious to the car coming toward him. The car passed over him. He missed the wheels.
I have a tendency to anthropomorphize, and I can get sentimental over almost anything. And in that moment, the palo verde beetle at risk of automotive-induced oblivion wasn’t just some immense scary, but harmless to humans, beetle — he became Marvin.
At this point, you might be asking, Is this the part where she stretches to make a trite point about how our views of people, or bugs or whatever, changes once we get to know them, or once they’re in danger?
It is not. It’s also not the part where I try to make some painfully awkward and insulting and vastly inappropriate comparison between a bug and imperiled humans in danger.
All I’m saying is sometimes, in very specific, nonmetaphorical ways, we don’t know what we think we know. And that’s OK. And, if we’re able to recognize our mistaken assumptions and change our estimation, being wrong can turn out well.
In a time where so much is high stakes, when conversations about the weather can morph into a diatribe claiming that global warming is a hoax, and discussions of current events are a minefield, I think about Marvin and how perspective can change.
Marvin is also a good reminder that we’re not the center of anyone’s universe. For all my freakout-ness about finding a Godzilla-sized beetle nonchalantly attached to my screen door, that bug couldn’t have cared less. It was trying to meet other palo verde beetles for some hubba-hubba bug time, and my soundtrack of AAAHHHH!!! wasn’t helping set the mood.
Next time you go to the grocery store, pay attention to how many people remain in their own invisible cocoons. Unless forced to interact by an errant orange or something, we’re usually not even on the radar of the guy standing next to us in the checkout line.
Is that a good thing? No, probably not. We should really see each other, and recognize that yeah, we’re human, and we make assumptions about each other — assumptions that we’ll never know aren’t true, unless we’re willing to be wrong.
And please, when you see a palo verde beetle this monsoon season, say hi to a Marvin of your own.
