Strange Habits

I have lived in the same house for something like 6 years now and today it just struck me that I have a very strange little ritual that I go through every morning before I leave for work and it has to do with lowly earth worms.

Being a person that would rip your mother's beating heart of her chest for a case of Redbull and some porno magazines you should realize that I am not the best person. I do not claim to be nor would most people mistake me for someone who cares. Often times you will even hear this sarcastic comment wafting out of my classroom: "It appears that you have mistaken me for someone who cares."  I take sarcasm and lack of emotion to a new level on most days. That is how I am.

So back to the earth worms.

This is my driveway. I realized that several years ago that every morning as I left for work there tends to be at least a few (sometimes 30 or more) earthworms who find themselves stranded on my driveway as the sun comes up. A combination of sunlight, concrete sucking the moisture out of their bodies, and ants tend to turn a huge number of them into worm jerky.

The really strange part is that over the last three or four years I have made a strange habit of walking my driveway before I leave and plucking the survivors off the concrete and tossing them back into the yard so they can burrow their way to a better life. On a good day I save ten or twelve of them and the rest are already jerky or ant food and lost causes.  The ones I save get a little pep talk then a quick flip into the grass as I move down the driveway.

Why do I do it? I have no clue. I have no great love for earth worms and will still use them for fishing bait without hesitation. In some little way I think it is my way of sticking it to the ants and giving the worms a fighting chance. Honestly? I get a huge feeling of satisfaction if I save even one worm per morning. I really cannot explain it beyond that. I save worms. I feel good about my morning. I go on about my business of being an asshole.

Maybe it is a way to get any residual goodness out of my system before the serious work of being a teacher gets done? Maybe it is the reason I am a teacher? I like plucking little creatures from their doom and giving them a chance to survive? I just do not know. No matter what it is I will probably continue to unconsciously scour the driveway every morning for the lucky survivors and then drive off to work without giving it a second thought.