Of bugs and princes

Thursday

Yesterday brought no major or minor injuries and only one freak-out scene.
At my favorite wireless hangout, the Equatorial Café, I saw a manager pushing something with his foot the way you would push a soccer ball. It was the size of a toddler’s pull toy, and it was A BUG!! Right out of the horror flicks. Honestly, I’ve never seen a bug so big, even in the Amazon. Thank goodness the manager didn’t squish it. He just coaxed it along to the sidewalk.
Be free, you primordial creature, and don’t come flying near me or my food! All I can say is that when Stuart Leavenworth told me I needed to get a book on insects because bugs would be my big challenge in Africa, he was on the money.

**
Also at the café, a waitress kept checking on me and whether I needed anything else. Then she said, “I feel like I’m bothering you. But I like you. I just like you.” (Don’t read more into this than courtesy. This is a country where, for the most part, kindness reigns.)

And then she said, “Do you have something to do with Amway?”

Well…
I said in fact I do. I’m staying at a house where the wife is big into Amway. (I’ve learned from Puni in the last 48 hours that Amway has pasta, olive oil and instant coffee, so I should have bypassed the Pick and Pay supermarket brand for products of superior quality. Next time, Puni.) I asked the waitress if she was an Amway rep on the side or whether she had been at the meeting at the Gab Sun last week and perhaps saw me there. No, she had not.
“I just feel it deep inside that you had something to do with Amway,” she said.
(Music from “The Twilight Zone” should be inserted here.)
Huh.
Could it be that the “brilliant sheen” on my hair from the Amway product is the giveaway, or could it be that my faux B.O. belies the truth? Do I carry myself with the air of a “home executive?” A lovable one at that.


**
I appreciate the e-mail heads-up from my high school friend Ann Baldwin Harris that Prince Harry is in the house – or rather, on a houseboat in the Okavango Delta, to be exact. That’s a 10-hour drive, and without a car I cannot throw myself into the role of exasperating paparazzi hound in search of a tabloid tidbit or a glittery crumb to throw your way. But feel free to start rumors about my hobnobbing with HRH. I could be at this moment swimming clandestinely through channels lined with papyrus and reeds up to his houseboat, a la Mr. Mean, to offer some generous tips about leech removal. Use your imagination, and take it from there.