A new sport is sweeping the nation, so popular that the International Olympic Committee is considering it as an event. It is Meal Worm Tossing. Tens of thousands are now honing their skills by tossing meal worms in mid-air to awaiting frogs in goldfish ponds.
I stand corrected. Snopes, the friendly fact checker, says my numbers aren’t exactly right. Instead of tens of thousands, it’s more like four in the entire world and one is now serving 10 to 15 years for a Ponzi Scheme in Michigan and two more are confined to a mental institution in upstate New York. And then there’s me.
But lack of competition or not, when my country calls on me to represent Uncle Sam at the Olympics in Paris, I’ll be ready. When it comes to Meal Worm Tossing, I’m pretty damn good.
Meal Worm Tossing is a lost art. Well, actually it was never a found art, but it is an art and it’s all in the wrist.
The challenge is to deliver an almost weightless, yet wiggling meal worm to the lily pad of a perched frog so that he can snatch it up before the goldfish get it. And goldfish really like mealworms. Our pond now has 16 goldfish and they know when I bring the bag of meal worms to the pond that the battle is on. They are ruthless to the extent that they will slither up on the lily pads and snatch the meal worm before the frog can figure out if it’s live or Memorex. Frogs, you see, only eat things that twitch, so you must warm the meal worms in the palm of your hand and get them moving. Then your palms get a little sticky and it’s hard to gently toss the wiggling critter so that he lands softly on a pad or flat rock and twitches within a tongue’s length of a young bullfrog.
And then there is the wind factor. One gentle puff of wind will send a weightless meal worm far off course, sometimes up into the grass where even 16 goldfish can’t get to it. That’s points off, right there. But with practice, the elements can be overcome and even with sweaty palms and wiggling meal worms, a gentle flip of the wrist places the meal worm in exactly the right place and the frog eats it.
Let the games begin.