Getting Stung

My friend Lacy is incredibly scared of bees, hornets, wasps. Like, obviously, no one really likes to be stung by any of them, but she has an innate terror the likes of which you don't often see outside of horror movies.

We were having a beer on her deck, enjoying a Friday afternoon and she showed me a hornets nest from the year prior that was built in their outdoor light. She basically said, if the hornet comes back this year, she's hiring someone to kill it with a flamethrower.

The ironic thing is, she just got stung for the first time ever a week prior on the bottom of her foot. She admitted it wasn't too bad, but then back tracked and thought maybe that's because it was on the part of the foot that is really tough. The anxiety is still there at the extreme levels it was before.

I've only ever been stung once too. The soccer fields by my house had thousands of those small yellow flower weeds and there were always tons of bees when games weren't going on.

On the other side of those fields were woods that me and my buddies used to play in. One time I went sprinting across the fields towards the woods where adventure awaited.

I didn't even realize what was happening. I thought it was a mosquito until I looked down and saw the bee still attached to my leg. I had those dumb kid thoughts like, "Hmmm, this sort of sucks. Should I react? Do I cry?"

I don't think I did much other than curse, which was something my friends and I had just started doing when no parents were around.

But anyway, this conversation reminded of a time back in third grade. I had this baseball coach I didn't like. He was always yelling at us, his son, his wife, just everyone. He was an angry bastard.

Well, this one game I remember being particularly tired, it was incredibly hot, and when you're on the baseball field and you feel hot and you're wearing those thick baseball pants that don't breath and that dust is getting kicked up... well, let's just say that's all my least favorite things in one experience.

So I'm angry, and I don't like my coach.

I'm sitting on the bench, my time to bat was still at least six or sever kids away. I'm just praying for some sort of relief.

Then, I see a wasp start working it's way up coach's leg. I raise my hand to get his attention and then I hear him grumbling as he looks at the batting order on the piece of paper in his hands. My hand went down, I watched as the wasp crawled up his shorts, and a few seconds later he got stung near ... well you know where near.

He swatted and started cursing and got really red in the face with how angry he was.

I was sort of a jerk as a kid. I think even if someone I didn't like was in the same situation now, I'd probably tell them... probably.