COLUMN: Working on the Fly

By Tobin Barnes
The empty bottles in the wooden crates by the pop machine at our motel drove my old man nuts.
  
Made him hate those same bottles that he at other times had loved and valiantly protected for their two-cent apiece cash value.
  
He hated those pop bottles because they attracted flies in the non-winter months, particularly during the summer tourist season. Tourists meant money, but flies didn’t, so, yowsa, did he ever hate flies.
  
Flies had sticky summer conventions around our empties. They liked to explore the insides and outsides and discover everything about those bottles, whether they had held orange, grape, cola or even cream soda (yuck!). Nope, these weren’t particular flies. Sticky, syrupy sugar of any concoction was their raison d’etre.
  
A goodly number of them became so overwhelmed with the bounty they’d climb right into the dregs of those bottles and dog paddle--even backstroke--around in them, slurping it all up, evidently enjoying the fly life to the max.
  
That is, until they realized it was all too much of a good thing and found themselves drowning a gurgling death of sweet slop.
  
Whenever my old man would show someone a room on the ground floor, he’d necessarily have to walk them by the cases of empty pop bottles. Then swarms of flies billowed up petulantly around them every time, and though my old man hadn’t been to business school, he innately sensed that this just wasn’t a good first impression when here he was trying to get money out of skeptical, tight-fisted Iowa farmers temporarily identifying themselves as skeptical tourists.
  
But heck, I used to think, they’d already been looking at him pretty warily with his wearing overhauls--sometimes without a shirt--and all the what not I’ve already told you about.
  
Well, whatever. No use discussing his Bates Motelesque, edgy appearance with this guy. That was one big non-starter. He marched to his own fife and drum corps.
  
So it came down to the flies.
  
Yeah, flies and dead flies and sticky pop bottles--even I, who could usually care less, had to admit it could be a ugly mess.    
  
Now one solution would have been to get rid of those cases of empty pop bottles. After all, no pop bottles, no flies, you’d think.
  
But nope, that was never even considered because, of course, to my old man’s way of thinking, that would mean people might not return their empties. And that meant that money, at the rate of two cents a pop, literally, would be marching off the premises.
  
But you know, I’m thinking--with the admitted benefit of 50 years hindsight--that most guests would have just left their empties in their rooms, which most of them did anyway.
  
And we could have stored the bottles inside instead of outside. And, sure, some bottles might have been sitting around at times on the concrete by the pop machine, but we could have moved those inside as well when we saw them.
  
Decades later, and maybe even then as a seven-year-old kid, I clearly see that would have been a reasonable solution.
  
But maybe the fog of war clouded my old man’s judgement back then because... well, see, “I” became the other solution.
  
After finishing up with Art James and “Jeopardy” on a summertime morning or maybe a rollicking edition of “Truth or Consequences,” my old man would turn to me there on the sofa and casually tell me, “Why don’t you go out and kill fifty flies?”
  
Weird, you say?
  
Not in the world I lived in.
  
So there I’d go with my fly swatter, out, to kill fifty flies.
  
And, believe it or not, I counted them as I killed them...one...two...three....