Nothing but crickets

It's the time of year when crickets begin to invade my house. I don't think enough about the intellectual capacity crickets to think that they're really planning on going inside someone's house, I just think they're looking for someplace warm andthey  feel warmth coming from the house and hang out nearby. Then they just hop right in when we open the door.

When I was a kid in Brooklyn, the only thing I knew about crickets were from Pinocchio. I think there are crickets even in Brooklyn, and I know that was chirping stuff outside during the summer, but I never really thought about what they were or the possibility of them coming into the house. And in Disney's Pinocchio, the cricket was dapper charming helpful little fellow.

Then one day, for some reason, I read the original Pinocchio. It was written by some Italian guy, I don't think it was da Vinci or Verdi, but it was some famous Italian guy I think. In the book, Jimmy Cricket is a scold. He's always trying to tell Pinocchio what to do and Pinocchio eventually gets frustrated with him and eventually squashes him with a shoe. Now that I have crickets in meeting my house, this seems like a much better outcome than what happens in the movie. Not that I know what happens to the cricket in the movie anyway. I can't even remember what happens to Pinocchio once he turns into a real boy. It can't be anything really good. He's basically an orphan, with some little old puppetmaker guy who'll probably be dead in 18 months as his stepdad. He has no skills or education or actual family. I guess that's okay as an outcome for a puppet, but it wouldn't be my first choice. It would be ironic if he ended up being a puppetmaker though, don't you think? "Oh yeah, I used to be just like you."