Some people freak out, or at least become extremely squeamish, when they see a bug.  For example, when large black ants invade our kitchen in the spring (as they tend to do before I put down the summer supply of ant traps), my wife goes nuts.  She gingerly picks up each invader with a paper towel, squeezes it, and deposits towel and crushed ant in the trash, whereas I squeeze the critter between thumb and forefinger and am done with it.

Bugs – i.e., insects and their cousins, not the kind that infect computers – neither frighten nor disgust me.  I consider them to be fascinating examples of the variety of life.  If my interests hadn't gone in a different direction, I might have made the study of bugs my life's work.  Indeed, when I was a kid, I was far more intrerested in entomology (the study of insects) than in etymology (the study of the history and origins of language).

Apparently, as a child, I had no fear of insects and regarded them instead with some affection.  One of my older brother's favorite stories concerns how I used to take bugs to bed with me and sing to them.  After I had been put to bed, my brother would say to my mother, "Mother, Richard is singing to his bugs again."  And there I would be, in bed with a fistful of creepy-crawlies, singing to them:  Hummm, hummm.  I don't remember doing this at all, but I have no reason to believe that my brother would have invented such an outrageous story.

Though, as an adult, I've lost this perverse affection for bugs, I remain comparatively undisturbed by them.  True, I do not appreciate stinging or biting insects, and each summer I wage a campaign of brutal and systematic annihilation against the wasps and hornets that want to set up residence in a tree near our front door.  While I was living in Texas for a couple of years, I developed a deep hatred of Texas-size cocroaches, even though most natives of the Lone Star State take them for granted and assured me that they are harmless.  When I saw one crawling up the wall in a luxurious ranch house, the owner said casually, "Ah, it's just an outdoor roach."  "But it isn't outdoors," I screamed, "and it is a cocroach!"  I also did not like seeing the crickets swarm in Austin, Texas, during my first summer there – so thick that one could hear them crunching under car wheels and couldn't walk down the main street of town at night without stepping on them.

Certain relatively small beasties that are not classified as insects are also turn-offs.  Again in Texas, I learned to hate and fear scorpions.  Once, I saw one crawling across my bed.  After I had pummeled it to death with a three-pound book that happened to be handy, I was informed, by someone who should know, that scorpions travel in pairs and that I should seek out its mate.  I never did find the other scorpion, and I did not sleep much that night.  I don't mess around with spiders either, though I don't fear them as much as I fear scorpions.  Spiders don't usually attack human beings, and most are harmless to us, though I do hate the icky feeling I get when I walk into a spider web.

But I digress; I was talking about insects.  To me, most bugs – except the biters and stingers – are interesting and even admirable.  I do not choose to kill them for the mere sport of it.  The common housefly is an exception.  They annoy me, so I have cultivated a technique for dispatching them with rubber bands; it's more satisfying than using a fly swatter.  I take four or five rubber bands and fasten them together in a string.  I hold one end of the string of rubber bands between the thumb and forefinger of my left hand, using this as a "gunsight."  Then I pull back the other end with my right hand and let go of that end while still holding the "gunsight" in my left.  With practice, one can kill a fly with one shot.  It is best to target a fly that is sitting on the edge of something, else one's walls and ceilings become spattered with fly juice.  Hitting one of these acrobatic creatures in flight takes even more skill and practice, but I've been known to do it.  The hand equipped with a rubber band is faster then even to multifaceted eye of a fly.

I would not, however, think of killing other bugs in this manner.  Wasps, yes – but one had better hit solidly on the first shot, for wasps have nasty dispositions and will take umbrage at being shot at.  Flies and biting or stinging insects aside, I take a live-and-let-live view of bugs.  If they don't harm me, I don't harm them.  Wouldn't it be nice if we all had this attitude toward all living things?