A Snail's Pace

When I was a child, we lived in an apartment complex in northern California that was inundated with snails. I was only three or four, but I still remember not even being able to walk down the sidewalk without accidentally crunching a few.

Eventually, my dad was able to get rid of them all (milk jugs + beer = snail death), but not before they showed me a little game. A game with snails.

The game was simple, easily-learned by someone with my (arguably limited) cognitive ability. You find a snail, lay down next to it, and poke it's eye stalks over and over again, watching them extend and retreat, over and over again. Eventually, even a snail is capable of catching on, and they no longer ventured their eyes out into the world of 4-year olds. That's when the end of the game began.

Carefully, you grabbed the snail on each side of his shell, and proceeded to pull him from the sidewalk. Oozing slowly, he hung there between my thumb and forefinger, dreading...waiting.

THWACK!

With all the force a small child fueled by curiosity and slightly rabid excitement could muster, the snail was hurled across the yard and into the fence.

THWACK! THWACK! THWACK!

Snail, after snail, after desperate snail followed his brethren, unwilling and yet completely incapable of resisting their fate of peeling through the air at what must have been (to them) unthinkable speeds, before finally shattering their homes and bodies across a steadily-growing, vertical graveyard of crushed shells and dismembered bodies.

Hours, I would spend doing this, and for hours my parents would hear the tiny, echoing deaths of hundreds of unlucky participants. Finally, my mother or father would pull back the sliding glass door, and (now possibly a bit concerned with my newfound fervor) urge me to come inside, wash my hands, and go watch Cinderella.

An obedient child, I would reluctantly oblige, but quietly, with the patience of a monk, I would await the next day, when the backyard would be full of new victims, blithely living their lives, mere feet below their eventual, eternal damnation.