outsmarted by a crawdad

so, back before athens had that nice greenway and the current greenway entrance on oconee street was a just crappy old salvation army store, there was a small tributary of the oconee river across the street. it was there that i found my pet crayfish, little guy.

ah, little guy. we had such good times together.

when first i rescued you from your beautiful, free home and forced you to live in a small fishbowl with two dirty old goldfish you were indeed little. but how you grew. catching all of those fish flakes in your claws and biding your time. you had a plan all along to regain your freedom and i had no idea. sneaky little guy.

i didn't think that crayfish were intelligent enough to plan, but i should have realized that something was up when you started stalking the goldfish. waiting on your rock for them to swim by so that you could jump on them and hang onto their tail fins. is that how you did it? it is just a small leap from the back of a fish to the top of the bowl. i wonder...

and still you grew. and plotted your escape. and still i had no clue. feeding you more and more fish food and remarking on how cute you were and how you were getting so much bigger.

then one day, the inevitable- little guy was gone. he disappeared. i still don't know how. i looked everywhere but to no avail. finally, i was forced to come to the sad conclusion that simon the cat had eaten him. poor little guy.

later that night i went out to the manhattan and ran into my friend ben who said that he saw the strangest thing earlier that evening. what did he see? well, he was out walking his dog on milledge avenue and saw a crayfish walking down the street. casually making his way along the gutters of milledge. now i know that it's improbable that the crayfish he saw was actually little guy. milledge avenue is quite a ways from carr street but still... perhaps it was more than just a simple coincidence. perhaps little guy made his break for freedom and headed off to sorority row for some good times before making his way back to the banks of the muddy creek where we first made our acquaintance. i'll never know for sure but i certainly like that version of the story better than the idea of him in simon's stomach.

little guy. the coolest crayfish i've ever known. perhaps because he's the only crayfish i've ever known but anyway, i like to imagine him dropping into the rain gutters of milledge avenue at sunset and spending the rest of his crustaceous life listening to the sounds of bad country music blaring from the frat houses and looking up the skirts of sorority girls as they pass by chatting on their cell phones. hell, i guess it beats living in a damn fish bowl.

*addendum: eli would like me to note that little guy was also his pet. this fact was omitted from the story for the sake of simplicity. i was in no way implying that eli was a bad crayfish owner or that he was not equally invested in the welfare of little guy (rip).