Can Ants Learn to Fiddle?

I don’t know if there was a picture of the Pope hanging anywhere in the house of my youth, or of the President.  I can’t remember any photos at all.  But if there had been a picture of a leader to emulate, it would have been, in scientific parlance, Kingdom: Animalia, Phylum: Arthropoda, Class: Insecta, Order: Hymenoptera, Suborder: Apocrita, Superfamily: Vespoidea, Family: Formicidae.  It would have been an ant.

Remember Aesop’s story of the ants and the grasshopper?    

In a field one summer's day

a Grasshopper was hopping about, chirping and singing to its heart's content.  An Ant walked by, grunting as he carried a plump kernel of corn.

"Where are you off to with that heavy thing?" asked the Grasshopper.

Without stopping, the Ant replied, "To our ant hill.  This is the third kernel I've delivered today."

"Why not come and sing with me," said the Grasshopper, "instead of working so hard?"

"I am helping to store food for the winter," said the Ant, "and think you should do the same."

"Why bother about winter?" said the Grasshopper; "we have plenty of food right now."

But the Ant went on its way and continued its work.

The weather soon turned cold.  All the food lying in the field was covered with a thick white blanket of snow that even the grasshopper could not dig through.  Soon the Grasshopper found itself dying of hunger.  He staggered to the ants' hill and saw them handing out corn from the stores they had collected in the summer.

Then the Grasshopper knew: It is best to prepare for the days of necessity. 

I was raised to be an ant, to be industrious and thrifty, to save for the future.  Productivity was praised and rewarded, and there was no fiddling around.  My dad never took vacation days, choosing rather to take its equivalent in extra pay and work on our house, making it a decent place for the six of us kids to grow up in.  My mom’s parents had a subsistence farm, working in the fields incessantly to grow food for their winters.  My dad’s parents lived in the basement of their house in Chicago, renting out the main floor for income. 

I retired at 63 to honor and enjoy my marriage to Kathy, to share the time we’re given, especially since I’d been ant-like for the 39 years of our marriage to that point.  But I find that in retirement, industry and productivity are disharmonious, cut against the grain, perhaps even foolish.  I left my good job so that a younger person could have it, could earn a living on it as I had.  And now in retirement I find that we are the old ones, the ones for whom endless ant-ness makes no sense.  Now is our time to play a bit more, to take time to . . . .

I wonder what the ants did during Aesop’s winter.  Oh, that Aesop would have been a bit more Jungian, that the fable would have gone on to have the grasshopper learn to work, and the ants learn to play.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.