Bats vs Learys

I had Oprah on the other day. I just had it on, I wasn’t watching it. Anyway, as they cut away to a commercial, Oprah said, “Coming up, the words no mother wants to hear from her child…” This interested me because I had already heard the words no mother wants to hear from her child. These words are: “Mom, there’s a bat on your pajamas.”

This happened a few summers ago now, but I remember every minute of it like it was yesterday. It was early morning. I was sitting at our dining room table in my pajamas, talking on the phone and writing something down. When Devin came downstairs, I stood up for some reason, still nattering away, and she said, “Mom! Mom! Mom! Mom!”

I snapped my fingers and frowned – the universal mother’s sign-language for “shut your trap, I’m on the phone.”

“MOM,” Devin said again, her voice rising now. I looked at her, and that’s when she said THOSE WORDS. She was staring down at my thigh, backing up and stammering, “Mom, there’s a …bat on … your… pajamas!”

Time stood still then. I was staring at Devin, blinking, the phone held to my ear. Later, we would puzzle over my eventual response, which was, “Is .. it … real?” For some reason I was whispering and looking intensely into Devin’s eyes, when I said this. I couldn’t bring myself to look down at my pajamas.

“YES!” Devin screamed, and I then I had to look down and there it was – clinging to my threadbare, paper-thin pajama bottoms – a furry, hideously ugly, maniacally grinning brown bat. He gripped my pajamas with claws that came out of – get this – his wings!. He was grimacing up at me! That’s right, he was leering at me with his half-human/half-pig face and the next thing I knew I was standing at the opposite end of our house shrieking my head off and clinging to Devin, who was also shrieking her head off. In our flight through the house I had somehow managed to brush my cheerful, pug-nosed passenger from my pajamas (and drop the phone) and Devin and I just stood there, clinging to each other, alternately shrieking, laughing and crying.

I’m telling this story now because it’s bat season again. The bats are coming out of hibernation and will soon be darkening the sky around our house every evening. Don’t get me wrong – I love the idea of bats. When we bought our place in Connecticut, we were well aware of the area’s bat population and were pleased that our property was inhabited by so many of these useful creatures. According to an article in the local paper, a single brown bat can devour between 3,000 and 7,000 mosquitos in one night. At dusk, Denis and I used to watch them fly out from under the eaves of our old barn and dart about the sky, and we would gaze up at our little mosquito-assassins and smile. In our minds, there was a beautiful symbiosis between the bats and the Learys. We owned the property, but were willing to allow the bats to live on it. In return they would kill all the mosquitoes so that we could sometimes eat our supper outside. We lived under the misconception that there was a mutually understood, unwritten treatise clearly defiining the boundaries of our territories. The bats got the whole outside. The only place off-limits to them was the inside of our house. We knew that bats sometimes carry rabies, but what we didn’t know was that up close, the bat’s creepiness quotient is off the charts, and, like a terrorist, he doesn’t set much store by boundaries. He rules through fear and intimidation and travels about with the smug knowledge that he can go anywhere he damn well pleases. And he does.

NEXT: Bats: Part Two, starring Denis Leary