A Pair of Ragged Claws as Metaphor for a Very Bizarre Week

What a very bizarre week.

And I'm not even talking about the week in politics, but let's start there:  in one week, we saw a Supreme Court justice nominee, news of Trump's taxes, a debate that was more like a yelling event than an exchange of ideas, and the president (and many of those in his orbit) testing positive for COVID-19.  Right now he's in Walter Reed hospital, and it's hard to know what his prognosis truly is.

It was a strange week at work too.  It's always strange to come back from vacation, but this week was stranger than most.  In my first hour back, the fire inspector came to do the follow up; I didn't know if the issues had been fixed, but I showed her around the building.  The issues outside of my control had not been fixed.

The work week got even stranger when I found an unfamiliar man in our break room wearing one of our school t-shirts.  I asked if I could help him, and he said, "I'm from the fire department.  I'm here to follow up on their work.  Looks like they did a good job for you."

Now I am more likely to be a fire department member than the man in our break room:  he had a very scruffy look.  He went to our bathroom, and when he came out, we asked him again what he was doing on campus, since he had also been in one of our Vet Tech labs.  He walked down the hallway to the door to the parking area saying he was working for the building owner, installing office space.

And the work week got even stranger when we discovered that someone had a cot upstairs in a vacant office suite--and not just a cot, but seven plastic jack-o-lanterns the size of fists, a pack of beef jerkey, two fleece pillows, and a shirt.  The work week got even stranger the next day when the building manager found all sorts of medical stuff in that office suite--the medical building next door to us reported a break in, and by the end of the day, our visitor was in police custody.  

The burglar had gotten into our EMS lab, and we're still not sure how.  The door was locked during the week, and the alarm never went off.  By the time we got to Friday, I was happy to have a day without a visit by law enforcement or fire authorities.

The week had other strange notes.  On Sunday, when we drove to church to do our socially distanced activities, I heard strange noises coming from somewhere in the car.  It wasn't the traditional strange car noise like a belt that's about to break or pieces grinding together.  In the church parking lot, when my spouse looked under the hood, he didn't shriek, like I was expecting.  He shook his head in disbelief with a bit of a hoot, and when I looked, I understood why.  There, perched by the windshield washer fluid resevoir, was a huge blue crab, and he was not interested in coming out of the engine.

How did it get there?  I don't know.  The car had been parked in the driveway for over a week.  That driveway is not next to any body of water--it's not very far away, but not close in terms of scuttling crab claws.  

When we got back to the car, the crab wasn't there.  Later in the week, we found a crab in our swimming pool.  My spouse thinks it's a different crab, but I'm not sure.  My spouse fished the crab out of the pool and left him under a tree; later in the day, he wasn't there.

When I look back on this week, will I remember the crab?  Perhaps, now that I've written about him; and why do I give the crab a male gender?  A big creature, uninterested in what we think he should do, a creature that snaps its claws--yes, sounds like someone else I know, and not just the president of the U.S.  

Every time I think about crab claws, I think of those lines from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," by T. S. Eliot:  "I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas."  I didn't expect that poem to be such a constant companion through the past few decades.  Looking back, I shouldn't have been surprised perhaps.

The unknown question:  how does J. Alfred Prufrock deal with his elderly years?  It's a poem that speaks to both youth and midlife--how does it translate to those years from age 70 onward?  And how does that translate to the lives we're living?