Ribbit

“Be nice to Bernice!”

That was writ­ten on a sticky note next to the phone when I worked at the col­lege radio sta­tion, WREK. Her story changed depend­ing on who was telling it to you, but the con­sen­sus was that she was an older woman who lived alone and spent her time in front of the tv. One day she mis­di­aled a num­ber and got the WREK call-in line, dis­cov­er­ing a phone num­ber which almost always had some­one there to answer she saved the num­ber and began call­ing it frequently.

I remem­ber clearly the first time I had a call from Ber­nice. I was play­ing some beau­ti­ful clas­si­cal music and the phone rang, the lat­ter being quite unusual dur­ing my show because I did the morn­ing shift, 6am to 9am. It was quiet and let me play clas­si­cal music, low stress, noth­ing big. So when the phone rang, I answered it.

“WREK.”

“Can rats climb up your drain pipes?”

That’s how the con­ver­sa­tion opened.  She had an odd ques­tion and called WREK for some rea­son. I real­ized it was Ber­nice and so I let the con­ver­sa­tion go on, I had another 10 min­utes before the music ended.

“I think so… why?”

And off we went through her bab­bling story telling about find­ing a rat in her house and how it must of come through the drain pipes, the evils of rats and such. It was an unusual ques­tion and I gen­uinely tried to be help­ful in answer­ing it, I did think rats could climb up drain pipes. That story came back to me this morn­ing after sleep­ing very deeply.

Yes­ter­day K and I were in tran­sit for approx­i­mately 13 hours, from Atlanta down I-75 to US-82, which crossed Geor­gia to drop grand mom off before get­ting on I-95 and tak­ing it down to Titusville to pick up Mat­tie from K’s mom, then head­ing into town to try and pick up a CD for next week’s episode before finally head­ing home.

K and I had been get­ting ready for bed, both in the bath­room (which I had used pre­vi­ously when we first arrived home.) I lift the toi­let lid to throw away a tis­sue, and both K and I jump back in sur­prise as a frog stares up at us from the bowl. I drop the toi­let lid again and K and I just stare at each other in surprise.

I don’t know how he got into the toi­let. There are a few possibilities:

1. He hopped into the apart­ment when we were unload­ing the car and the door was open for peri­ods of time, made his way to the bath­room and leapt into the toilet.
2. He has been in the apart­ment and found his way to the toi­let over the past few days.
3. Tele­por­ta­tion.
4. He came up the pipes somehow.

In any case, the frog was quickly removed from the toi­let via a plas­tic bag and a hand. To be released out­side, leav­ing K and I to laugh about it as we finally called it a night and fell into a deep sleep.

I stand by my answer to Ber­nice: ani­mals can come up drains.