A lesson on nature, courtesy of Big and Tiny
My nephew Ed caught a frog the other day. It was about as wholesome an experience as can be imagined, a scene worthy of a Norman Rockwell illustration.
Ed and Logan had been fishing at the neighborhood pond, a time-honored pursuit for 12-year-old boys. They wound up with quite a good catch, not a fish but two different sized frogs that they promptly christened Big and Tiny.
There wasn’t any question of catch and release for prizes like these. Big and Tiny went home with Ed in paper cups filled with pond water.
Twenty years ago, the story would peter out about here. Maybe the boys would crack open the encyclopedia to check up on frogs. Little of the small print would seem to matter much. Maybe they’d offer some grass or dead flies to the frogs hoping they would enjoy that for food. But nowadays things are different.
At home they fired up the Internet. It turns out Big and Tiny were Green frogs. They required a high-humidity, amphibious environment including a mound composed of large, round gravel too big to be swallowed but smooth enough to protect the delicate skin of their feet. The ideal food for them was crickets.
Ed’s mom is my sister and she has a soft spot for both little boys and unusual pets. She also likes to make sure that any creature under her care is well fed so they drove to the pet store where it turns out that they sell live crickets to people for their reptiles and amphibians to eat.
The crickets came in two sizes. She bought a plastic bag full of lively small-size crickets. But she couldn’t bring herself to buy the cricket dispenser, a plastic device designed to ensure that the insects are pushed out efficiently at mealtime one by one.
Thinking of her own youth, where the existence of such a thing would be unfathomable, she went home, fished out a cardboard box, cut a small flap for a door in its side, wrapped rubber bands around it and fashioned her own dispenser.
Logan was duly impressed. He had advocated for the dispenser and also a separate humidifier, an idea that Ed squashed by noting that New Jersey frogs are probably well suited to the level of moisture in New Jersey air.
My sister and I were not raised with corncob dolls and homespun clothes. We grew up with television, Barbie dolls and bicycles. But we came from a world where, every once in a while as part of our play, we had to make or improvise some necessary piece of equipment ourselves.
Barbie-sized dinnerware wasn’t sold in stores but we knew Barbie had to eat. So we saved toothpaste caps for Barbie’s cups and beer bottle caps for her plates.
Consumer culture surely existed. But it hadn’t yet fully flowered into today’s form. It was a world without cricket dispensers.
But the natural world has always been complex. Tiny disappeared from the tank one night. Ed suspects Big ate him since he wasn’t keen about chowing down on the small-size crickets. Big was returned to the pond the next day.
My nephew realized that even the most well-provisioned frog lacks many of the things that God supplies both bountifully and freely. Ed still has his memories and a nice photo of the frog balanced on his forearm.
