Adam and the Ants: The Beginning
Chapter 1: The Ant Farm

Copyright© 2014 by LastCallAgain

I'm just an ordinary average guy
My friends all are boring
And so am I
We're just ordinary average guys

--Joe Walsh, "Ordinary Average Guy" (used without permission)


Sunday, April 8, 1984

Mom was bustling around the kitchen, working on Sunday dinner and I was sitting at the table pretending to do my homework when my grandparents pulled into the driveway. It's sort of our Sunday tradition: After church, Grammy drags Pappy to as many as a half dozen yard sales and flea markets and when they're done they come to our place for dinner. They almost always bring something back for one of us— a piece of "milk glass" for my mother's collection, some obscure tool or gadget for my father's garage workshop, a garish painting to hang in the dining room— it's truly pot luck. That day was my turn.

Grammy was always excited about whatever "find" they came up with, but that particular Sunday she was nearly ecstatic. She didn't even wait to get up the steps onto the back porch before shouting, "Wait 'til you see what we found for you, Adam!"

"No need to tell the whole neighborhood, Mama," my mother admonished. "He's right here in the kitchen."

They bustled through the door and Grammy, as always, made a beeline to my seat at the table for a hug and a kiss on the cheek. Pappy ambled over behind her and tousled my hair. "Hiya kid! Feast your eyes on this!"

My curiosity was piqued. Pappy goes along with Grammy every Sunday for the fresh air and exercise— "And there's always someone selling tools," he told me once— but he rarely shares her enthusiasm for the gifts she brings home. He winked, and with a flourish revealed the cardboard box he had been holding behind his back. I recognized it immediately: A vintage 1970's-era Uncle Milton's Ant Farm!

Now I understood my grandparents' excitement. When I was much younger, maybe five or six, I had wanted one of these in the worst way. Unfortunately for me, the age recommendation on the box was eight and up. Looking back on it now, I guess "tantrum" is a good word for it. At the time, however, I felt that I was simply standing up for my rights as a child of maturity ahead of my peers. The fact that I was demonstrating this maturity by laying on the floor of Toys-R-Us and screaming my lungs out didn't help my case at all. My grandparents had been with us that evening and lobbied in my favor despite my acting out, but my parents held their ground and we went home empty handed. By the time I turned eight my interests had moved on, and I hadn't even given ant farms a passing thought since. Now, however, holding the box again brought back wistful memories.

NEW!
CONNECTABLE
FASCINATING
ANT FARM

You take the farm, we mail the ants!

See the LIVE ANTS:
Dig tunnels
Build bridges
Move mountains

FUN for the whole FAMILY!

Break resistant
Escape Proof!

A section of the bottom left corner of the box was faded and had a yellowish tint as if the box had spent a number of years mostly covered, perhaps in an attic. Otherwise the box could have come directly from the store that very day.

I swept my erstwhile homework aside and set the box almost reverently on the table. The colorful top half of the box was still taped to the plain brown bottom half with what appeared to be the original, now yellowed and brittle, Scotch tape. I gently separated the barely-adhering tape from the box with my pencil and slid the top half off. I was half afraid that the structure might have been broken over the years despite the well-kept condition of the box. My fear was unfounded, though, and nestled in the bottom half of the box, there it all was: the classic green pre-assembled plastic "farm" sandwiched between clear plastic plates; two matching green snap-on 'feet' to hold the farm upright; a clear plastic bag of white sand with the" Uncle Milton" logo printed in blue; a red 12-inch long plastic straw; a six-inch long syringe; a smaller, re-sealable plastic bag of some granular brown and black powder labeled "Ant Food - Keep Dry"; an 8.5x11 instruction sheet; and a smaller sheet labeled "Ant Order Form." I picked up each item and gave it a quick inspection. Everything appeared to be like new other than the bag of sand, which had a small tear in the corner and had leaked about a quarter of its contents into the box. I also noticed a single odd, oversized grain of sand inside the bag. It was easily three or four times the size of the rest and was covered in bright blue spots. Any further examination was curtailed by my mother, who declared that dinner was almost ready.

"Put your toy back in the box and gather up your -ahem- 'homework' then set the table." She had made little quote signs in the air with her fingers at the word homework— had she known I was waffling instead of studying? I felt my face redden.

"Busted!" Grammy tittered.

"Did you think I failed to notice," Mom asked, "That you have 'solved for x' on the exact same algebra problem five times?"

"I, um, well..." At that point there wasn't much I could say. Grammy was right— I was busted. I stopped trying to say anything and simply shrugged.

Mom continued giving me that 'angry mom' look for a moment, then grinned. "The table isn't setting itself, buster! Next week you are the chef for Sunday dinner."

I retrieved a quart-sized 'Zip-lock' bag from the pantry and poured the spilled sand into it, and put the pieces of the ant farm back in the box. The funky blue-spotted ... whatever ... was forgotten for the moment. I replaced the lid on the box, gathered up my algebra book and notes, and set the table.

After dinner we all made small talk while waiting for the weekly phone call from Dad. For years, he had worked as an electrician for Westinghouse, but at the beginning of the year he had been laid off along with several hundred others. After six weeks of unemployment he got lucky and landed a short-term job as a contractor with Amoco, helping to build a huge natural gas plant in the United Arab Emirates. We all hated not having him around, but the money was too good to pass up— he was making almost two years' worth of his Westinghouse wages in five months!

I dutifully filled out the order form for 'approximately two dozen Harvester ants, ' gave Mom cash in exchange for a check and put the envelope in the mail box. I then parked myself on the living room couch with Volume A of the World Book Encyclopedia I had received at the start of Junior High to learn everything I could about ants for the rest of the evening.

That night I dreamed of being an ant in an ant farm. I trooped about, digging tunnels, storing food in rounded chambers and climbing the windmill decoration. The details were fuzzy, but it was a pleasant dream.


The next few weeks were pretty much normal, for the end of the school year at least. I attended the West Jeannette Middle School Spring Formal in a charcoal grey suit over a pastel green shirt and matching tie, the entire ensemble having been bought for Easter Sunday. At the rate I had been growing I would be lucky to still fit into it by Labor Day. I went stag, as did most of my friends. We all wallflowered together, talking about which girls we would ask to dance if we were just a bit more confident— or actually knew how to dance.

Finals week brought a handful of group study sessions with my friends, which found us all much more outgoing and even downright boisterous than at the formal. English was almost literally a no-brainer, as we were all reading and writing well into high school levels, and that night's "study group" was little more than a pizza party to kick off Finals Week. Algebra and Earth Science took a modest bit of studying. The toughest for most of us was American History, which for the eighth grade final consisted of memorizing a bucket-load of names, events and dates from colonial days up through the War of 1812.

A little about my friends:

Brett Hamilton, the de facto leader of the group, was smart and a little bit nerdy like the rest of us, but more outgoing and charismatic. He enjoyed acting and had played parts in the West Middle School plays all three years. He was also the only one in the group who played any sports (Baseball) and the only one who had actually kissed a girl.

Charlie Detweiler, the smartest member of the group thanks to a nearly photographic memory and an innate ability with numbers, was already on the recruitment radar at MIT and RPI. He was frightfully body-shy and terrified of the prospect of showering after gym class in high school. Aside from not wearing glasses, Charlie was pretty much the stereotypical nerd.

David Goldman, the artistic one. From pencil doodles on desks at school, to oil paintings and clay sculpture, everything he created was beautiful. He was cursed with a mild stutter that got worse when he was excited.

Eddie Kyczynski (pronounced kiz-IN-skee), was the comedian of the group. His specialty was rewording popular songs with dirty lyrics, on-the-fly.

No. I'm not kidding. Adam, Brett, Charlie, David and Eddie. One day back in seventh grade, Charlie's mom called us 'The Alphabet Soup Gang.' That's who we had been, to each other and just about everyone else, ever since. We all had other friends outside the gang, of course. Brett had his baseball teammates, Eddie was in the Boy Scouts, and we all went to different churches. But the five of us were as tight of a group of friends as you will ever find.

The finals themselves, thanks at least in part to the study sessions, came and went without any significant drama. I finished the school year with a nice mix of A's and B's, enough to make the honor roll and earn glowing praise — and a few Andrew Jackson-faced rewards— from my mom and grandparents. The school had a modest "graduation ceremony" for us 9th graders, who would be moving on to Jeannette High School next year along with our contemporaries from East Middle School. Some of my peers took the ceremony to heart as a symbol of our moving on to something new and exciting; others panned it as lame. I wondered how many of them felt as I did, excited for a new experience but at the same time fearing leaving our comfort zone? As Freshmen of a sort, we had been at the top of the Middle School food chain. But after summer vacation we would be Sophomores, the lowest of the low at the Senior High School.

I put aside the trepidation I felt about starting Senior High as summer vacation approached. There was so much to look forward to this summer! There was the usual: sleeping in every day, swimming in the creek, fishing in the lake, and just being lazy in general. I also had a shiny new mountain bike, a Christmas gift from my grandparents, with which I planned to pedal around the neighborhood and beyond with the gang. We even had plans to bike the five miles to Greengate Mall, which in the hills of Southwestern Pennsylvania is quite a feat on a bicycle.

Then there was the one thing I looked forward to more than anything every summer: Charlotte Phelps.

Charlotte lived with her mother on the other side of town. Her grandparents, the Morrisons, lived across the street. Every summer she came to stay with them for several weeks. This had been the routine for as long as I could remember, and we had always been inseparable during her visits. Our birthdays were only a few days apart in July, and each summer the families put together a huge combined birthday and Independence Day party for us and invited all of our friends. Even more exciting was the prospect that although we had attended different elementary and middle schools, we would now be going to Senior High together.

Oh, yes. It was going to be the best summer ever ... or so I thought.

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