The Bat & The Kitchen Mat:
a bat causes a wardrobe change.
After a long day of moving apartments with the help of friends, it was a pleasure to have a hot shower in my new 12th floor apartment, slip into a soft old t-shirt, and snuggle into bed. Like the bat in the photo, I was peacefully tucked in for sleep.
Around 2 am, some movement must have woken me from my exhausted slumber. In the dim light coming from the hallway, without my glasses on, I recognized a bat flying around in my room.
Memory fails me as to how I got from bedroom to kitchen to slam the door. It must have been some kind of super-hero cartoonesque move. But I found myself in the kitchen. In a t-shirt-and-nothing-else. The door slammed almost as hard as my heart within my chest! How the heck did a bat get in??
In my early twenties, moving services were always provided by friends. Unpacking and settling into the new place was a matter of a few hours of puttering around. So I’d had enough time before bedtime to remove and wash the terribly dusty screens from the windows. They were drying in the bathtub when I crawled into bed.
On the 12th floor, I thought, as I had popped the screens out, there’s no risk of anything getting in through the open windows. WRONG!
One good thing about moving to a student apartment: you know your buddies are awake all hours of the night (or open to being woken up). It simply would not do to wander the corridors of the building in search of my engineering classmates in a t-shirt-and-nothing-else. But the rest of my clothes were in the room with the vicious, epic, circling in search of flesh bat.
I looked around the kitchen. There was a mat on the floor. I was skinny back then! The mat effectively wrapped around my waist, covering all that needed covering. Definitely sufficient coverage to go seeking help beyond the walls of my apartment door. So it was, shortly after 2 am, I surreptitiously crept from my apartment a few floors down to knock on my friends’ door.
They were awake. They got a good laugh out of my dilemma and my wardrobe choice! But they came to look for the bat. The comforter from my bed had landed on the bedroom floor as if I was still in it! The shape of a person was still visible in the form left behind when I had fled the bedroom!
High and low, every crevice, nook and cranny were examined. No bat. Perhaps in my absence the bat had left the way it came in?
“Keep the lights on.” They said. And I did as I was told … for about two weeks. The screens went back in before dawn. I never did find the little dried carcass of a bat, so I think it must have flown out before help arrived.
Even in that early time of being an international student in this country, I was aware (in the midst of my abject bat terror) that I was blessed:
with friends to help me move, with a place to call home,
with a kitchen mat that could fit around my waist, and
friends who came to help attend to my fears.
Perhaps my awareness of these blessings were heightened by the winged mammal who visited that night. Perhaps that was the message it brought me?