Mark K August 3rd, 2009

I found a bee in my root beer today. This wouldn’t have been especially troubling, except for two things: the bee was still alive, and the root beer was in my mouth at the time.

My neighbor Mark had given me the root beer, telling me that it was the most delicious root beer that he had ever tasted. He pointed out all of the benefits that were touted on the can: no preservatives, no sodium, no caffeine, and real cane sugar in place of high fructose corn syrup.

Of course I didn’t know that I had a bee in my mouth – I just knew that when I poured the last little bit of the drink into my mouth there was something solid and kind of big that didn’t belong in my root beer. At the time I was sitting at a table on our patio and almost spit into the cactus display in front of me, but didn’t want to spoil the flowers.

Mark has been retired for many years and had been watching me slave over my repairs to my irrigation system. The two workmen who I had hired had just left and I was cleaning up and admiring my work when he slowly crossed the street with the can of ice cold root beer.

I had once had a bee sting me on the lip as it followed part of my roast beef sandwich into my mouth, so the thought crossed my mind that the mysterious object might be a bee that had crawled into the can while it was briefly unattended.

The day before, Mark had watched me swinging a pick in the hot sun, with sweat pouring down my face. After each eight or ten swings I would have to take a rest, mop off my face and get a drink. He motioned for me to come over and explain to him what the project was about and expressed concern about how exhausted I looked. That’s about the time that I decided I would hire someone younger and stronger to do the picking the next day.

I decided to run into the house to spit out the root beer in the kitchen sink. That’s when I saw the bee, looking dazed but still alive, though barely moving. I was grateful to him for not stinging me and thought he should have a chance to survive.

The reason Mark was home watching me was that he had just returned from the hospital and was recovering from a procedure in which the doctors run a scope through his arteries, looking for blockage. He had felt chest pains while doing yard work and the doctors where trying to determine if his arteries could be cleaned out or stretched wider by inserting a stent.

I let the bee crawl onto a spoon and took it outside to the table on the patio. He kept shaking himself, like a boxer who had just been knocked down and was trying to clear his head so he could get up and fight again. He took his tiny front legs and rubbed his head, as if trying to remove the sticky layer of root beer. He tried to move his wings, but they were stuck together.

The doctor had told Mark the same thing that another doctor had recently told my father – that it was too risky to do a surgical procedure – to try to clean the arteries or insert a stent – because a piece of plaque might break loose and cause a heart attack. Open heart surgery was also out of the question for someone in his eighties. Mark was advised to limit his physical activity and take medication to control his blood pressure. He returned home and was taking it easy by sitting and watching me work across the street.

The bee kept working to clean himself and liberate his wings. I put him on the spoon again and moved him to a flower in a sunny spot. He began to move about the flower a bit drunkenly at first, but amazingly, he seemed to be going about his business of collecting pollen.

I couldn’t have asked for a more perfect tonic to revive me after two days of hard labor than the ice cold can of root beer – it was every bit as delicious as advertised. As he handed me the root beer, Mark described just how much sweat he had seen pouring down my face as I labored in the sun. Assured that I was finished with my labors, he headed back across the street.

The bee had crawled to the blossom at the very top of a flower. A sudden breeze picked up and swept the bee off the blossom. He took flight, circling three times as he gained altitude and disappeared from my sight.

By the way, the root beer – the liquid part, anyway – was great!

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