The Tale of the Bat

Yes, I know the first Presidential debate is scheduled to start in less than a half hour. I've got the VCR set, for real this time. But I don't want to let this story slip away.

I took my mom for an outpatient procedure today, a "nerve block" to dull the back pain caused by an accident on the morning of December 31, 2000. (She was T-boned at an intersection. She
was on her way to Church. The guy who hit her...was not.) On days that I do this (about once every four to six months) I drive her from our house to the pain clinic, drop her off, and then kill time in the area until I get the call that she is ready to be picked up. Usually, factoring in delays, the length of time the procedure takes, and the number of patients ahead of her, the whole thing takes two to three hours.

Sometimes I go home if I have time, but the clinic wants you to be able to pick up patients within 15 minutes, and we live farther away than that. So I will usually use these days as an opportunity to do something I do very rarely: shopping. Just going into stores, seeing what they are offering, and comparing prices. Not much actual buying, not anymore.

I hit several stores today, all built on the former site of some culm banks. Barnes & Noble, Target, Sam's Club - well, I bought batteries in Sam's Club.

One store that caught my eye was the newly-constructed Five Below. It seems like a fairly typical junk store, but its gimmick is that all the things inside are from $1 - $5 - nothing more. Some of the stuff, frankly, looked overpriced. But with lines half-a-dozen people deep, I decided I wasn't going to be buying stuff there today anyway. So I left.

This was the store's Grand Opening, so the store was packed with customers, customers who had driven there in cars. Which meant that the parking lot in front of the store was filled. I was able to find a parking lot on the side, near the back. To get to my car I had to walk along two sides of the complex. As I made my way down the first sidewalk, I noticed a brownish lump stuck to the side of the building, maybe two inches long, six feet off the ground. Did somebody do something to this wall already? I thought. Or is that...

Yes it was. It was a bat.

I looked around, but there was no one there to share the moment with, just like there was no one to share the circumzenithal arc I saw on the way out of work yesterday. I took a picture with my camera phone. I wish I had my regular digital camera with me, I thought. And then I realized, I did! Even though the day was gloomy and rainy, I had packed it in the car as we left this morning, just in case.

I got up as close as I could, in my judgement, without bothering the sleeping bat. I took one picture from its right side, and realized that there really wasn't too much more I could do. As long as the bat was sleeping, it wasn't going to be moving much. So I swung around to its left side and took an almost identical photo.


I tarried a bit as I saw a man approaching with a child on his shoulders. He was talking aloud to the toddler, and I heard him ask what I was taking a picture of.

"Bat," I said.

He looked, and showed his son without letting him touch it. "Looks like he picked a bad place to sleep last night," he said.

"He looks comfortable enough," I said.

And that was it.

I hope the bat went unmolested for the rest of the day. It was low enough to the ground that someone who wanted to hurt the little mosquito hunter wouldn't have to try very hard. I hope it has a good hunt tonight, eats well, and finds a safer and more secure place to bed down for the day in the morning.