The Worm & I

This fresh compost was shoveled over patchy parts of our lawn. "If you see something, don't freak out. They aren't worms; they are sprouts." Seems like an odd thing for a man to have to warn his wife about, but as you will read, we have history.

When I was a kid I loved sitting around on lazy Sunday mornings watching old black and white movies on Channel Five (KTLA), and among my favorite were the ones with Ma and Pa Kettle. A decade before the Beverly Hillbillies, the Kettles were a country bumpkin couple with ragamuffin kids coming out of their ears. Ma Kettle usually wore something like a patched calico dress with apron over it, with a pair of men's boots. Her grey hair was wrapped into a bun with crazy pieces flying every which way. The Kettles had crazy, comic adventures, usually involving tricking city slickers or bankers coming to repossess the farm (sometimes the kids would set up buckets to fall on their heads, or cover them in pig slop.) There was usually a romantic side plot with one of the older Kettle kids, maybe a pretty daughter (kind of like how the Munsters had a totally normal, beautiful blonde daughter who was the family misfit, the Kettles always had at least one fairly standard-looking child who, amazingly, was never embarrassed by Ma and Pa; in fact, she defended them fiercely.) Sometimes their oldest son would go off to college, then come home to the farm in a sweater vest and horn rimmed glasses to help save the farm from foreclosure.

I loved the Ma and Pa Kettle movies first, so imagine how much I loved the original movie that introduced the clan: the Claudette Colbert/Fred MacMurray classic, The Egg & I. The plot was simple and either sweet or sadistic, depending on your personal feminism leanings. Fred MacMurray is tired of the hustle and bustle of the city so he spontaneously buys a farm, where he and his beautiful, gentle new bride will raise chickens (as Ma and Pa Kettle is to The Munsters, so would-be farmers Bob and Betty are to Green Acres.)

If you are thinking, "What kind of psychopath surprises his wife with an impulsive career change to chicken farmer?" the gentle charm of this movie is not for you. But if one of your all-time favorite I Love Lucy episodes is the one where Lucy and Ricky buy the chicks before the henhouse is ready, you really might like it.

When I tell people my great grandparents were poultry farmers, they are usually surprised. And they lived in Los Angeles, too. Many Jews of that era were in the poultry business. One of my favorite pictures of my great grandma Eva is of she, with babies wrapped in adorable old timey baby clothes, sitting in a field next to their goats. "She used to slap a giant nipple on a glass of that and we'd drink and drink."

Grandma sometimes would tell me about the old chicken farming days, and she mentioned one time that she met Betty MacDonald, who wrote The Egg & I , on which the movie was based, on a plane flight from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Air travel was more exotic back then and also took longer, so they had plenty of time to talk. Grandma told Betty that the book was very accurate, which leads me to the conclusion that women put up with more from men back then, and with excellent good grace, than they do now.

Which leads me to my next conclusion: I, who love Fred MacMurray, who remember where I was when I heard he died (on a blind date at Yesterday's restaurant in Westwood eating a bowl of split pea soup with brown bread and butter), would have divorced Bob in a hot minute. I mean, Betty is Claudette Colbert, who stopped traffic with two inches of ankle in It Happened One Night.

So when Scott announced that he was becoming a farmer of sorts, by taking composting to the next logical level - vermiculture - I tried to channel my inner Betty. I really did. When he went online and ordered a few gallons of red wrigglers to "start the colony," I tried to grin and bear it. The woman and he had a lengthy and nonsensical, mostly one-sided argument via e-mail about shipping costs; who would have thought an online vendor of worms would be a strange character?

As Scott loaded up the stackable worm condos with table scraps, I thought: who exactly ARE we in this story, anyway? We sure as hell aren't Bob and Betty. Betty got to run around her adorable cozy kitchen in a ruffled apron chasing fluffy chicks. Are we Ma and Pa Kettle?

Vermiculture did not last long, unfortunately. I love all living creatures, some more than others. The worms had to go. Unfortunately, they were relegated to an outside patio far from the house during an unusual two week period of freak weather that was first much colder than usual, followed by a solid week unseasonably hot days. "Avoid exposure to temperature extremes at either end of the spectrum," Scott read from his vermiculture book. He was too sad to look, but one day, Eva had a playdate and we decided to check. Eva's friend is so brilliant for just having turned four that he identified a black widow spider, advised me that "you really ought to kill it," and fixed the washing machine by finding the proper error code in the manual. So when he said, "You know, I think some of them are still alive," I knew he could be trusted (I was too horrified to look.)

That night, I told Scott about it, and he found that indeed, there were a few hardy survivors of the massacre. "Move them! Put them in the ground. I see worms in the yard all the time." But sadly, red wrigglers will quickly die outside their stackable condo. They are too gentle for this world. Bred for fishing, and the few dozen hardcore vermiculturists fighting with their wives over condo placement, they really can't live anywhere else. They can't even eat spicy food. They like beans, but not spicy ones. They are tender souls, hermaphroditically reproducing and perhaps writing haikus by moonlight as a solo black widow tends her web next to their bin.