On the sizes of boxes to use if you must put people in boxes midweek jukebox and open thread

Chris in reply to BlaiseP says:

When I was a kid, I lived out in the country and there were two creeks that passed through my back yard. Both of these creeks were filled with crawdads (or crawdaddies, depending on how country you wanna git up in here), and the neighborhood kids, my friends and I, spent a lot of time catching them and playing with them. I remember being told, for years, that the little ones hurt worse than the big ones. So one day, I took a big one, with one giant pincher, and let it pinch me on the finger. I quickly learned that the big ones hurt much, much worse than the little ones (and that the big ones don’t like to let go).

Anyway, one time there was a painter in the neighborhood who was in the process of painting the kitchen of a neighbor’s house, and he saw a few of us catching crawdads in one of the creeks. He was an avid fisherman, it turns out, and told us that he’d pay us a nickle for every crawdad that we brought him. Dollar signs flashed before our eyes, and we spent the rest of the day catching hundreds of crawdads and putting them into a large metal bucket. We didn’t get back until he’d finished painting for the day and left the neighborhood, so we decided to put the crawdads in my parents’ garage for the night, so we could give them to him and collect our fortune in the morning when he got to work. Now, keep in mind, this was the middle of summer in Tennessee, so it was rather hot in that garage, and the water in the bucket was stagnant, which is to say, we had not placed them in the ideal environment for crawfish viability.

The next morning, as my Dad went in the garage to leave for work, my brother and I heard him yell a few words that we almost never heard come from his mouth, and then watched as he ran back into the house. Over night, every single crawdad in that bucket had died, and now the entire garage smelled like, well, like every single crawdad in that bucket had died. My Dad demanded that we drop what we put down our cereal spoons and remove that bucket from the garage immediately.

It was a big bucket, and we were small children, so in addition to the horrible smell in the closed garage and the awful site of a couple hundred crawdads belly up and white, we suffered the water, and therefore the smell (and, to us, the sight) splashing all over us the entire way as we moved the bucket from the garage to the nearest creek. I swear that smell clung to me the rest of the day.

Anyway, I tell you all of that to explain why, for me, extremely fresh crawfish is an absolute necessity, because it doesn’t take much to bring back the memory of that awful smell and sight. For years I couldn’t eat crawfish at all. I’m nauseated now just thinking about it.Report