Bats vs Learys – Part II

I just received an email reminding me that I promised another chapter in the Bats vs Learys saga. I meant to do a Part Two to this, but then couldn’t make up my mind which bat invasion I should write about next. I’m a little embarrassed that we have such a wealth of bat stories. We just went through a long period where we kept forgetting to close the chimney flue. If you’re new to country living, please take my advice and never leave the chimney flue open in the summertime. The first time we did this, we were in a rented house. It was before we moved up here full-time and were not so wise about the wild things that fly and crawl and slither into Connecticut country houses at all hours. Our children were very young – maybe three and five years old, and our friends Ted and Amanda Demme were visiting for the weekend. Long story short – I left the flue open and after dinner we saw something fluttering around the living room.

“I wonder what that is,” Denis said cheerfully.  Then the thing came fluttering into the dining room, aiming straight for Denis’s head and all hell broke loose. The rapid-fire tragic-comic stunt sequence that followed included (but was not limited to) Denis trampling our children, Denis using the most foul language imaginable in front of our children and Denis nearly knocking the very pregnant Amanda down a flight of stairs.

It occurred to me during those frantic moments, that until that night, I had never seen Denis genuinely afraid. During our years in the city, his courage had certainly been put to the test. There was the night, for example, when I woke up with the spine-chilling suspicion that there was another person in the apartment. I poked Denis awake and he grabbed a baseball bat and searched each room, tapping the thick of the bat against his palm. Another time an agitated homeless crack-addict guy approached us on the street and Denis assuaged him with a cigarette. His bravery was most admirably on display when our building became infested with mice and he would walk ahead of me into the kitchen, while I clung to him, my face buried in his back, whining, “Do you see any? Do you see any?” I had watched Denis stand up to Harvey Weinstein, out-curse a frenzied cabby, walk past gangs from the nearby housing projects without lowering his eyes and once when a snarling pit-bull came barreling toward us in the park, Denis, who loves dogs, began slapping his thigh, and before I knew it, he and the dog were playfully rolling around on the ground together. What I didn’t know then, was that every man has something that makes his blood run cold. For Humphrey Bogart in “The African Queen” is was leeches. For Denis, it’s bats.

Next: Bats vs Learys Part III – The Final Reckoning