Dear Miss Manners by Cheryl Ceasar

Tuğba K.

Dear Miss Manners,

Our mailbox is infested with tiny beetles. Today I pulled out a catalog of unaffordable fashion, for some reason titled Poetry, and there were things that looked like little eggs on the cover. I scraped them off, into the catmint below, using the other junk mail as a tool. I put the catalog in the recycling box. Now I need to make time again to look up how to be removed from the mailing list. I feel briefly bad about the wasted paper and wonder how all these extra jobs came to be part of our daily remit.

But that’s not what I’m writing to you about. I wonder, are we the only blighted mailbox on the block? The only one on the carrier’s route? Do they put on sanitary gloves before opening our box? The carrier changes fairly often, and we don’t know them, not even their name. Do they talk about us at the post office? Are we the house with the beetle box?

You may ask, why don’t I just spray insecticide? Well, I’m a vegan and try to avoid killing other creatures unnecessarily. And we have a cat, who might eat the dead beetles, or eat something that ate them… I should probably use some natural remedy like vinegar and salt. I need to make time to look this up. Then our mailbox will smell like a salad, and I don’t know what the carrier will think about that. 

Yes, I do realize that they have other things to think about. For me, this is just one more conduit to the deep well of my inner shame. Another unveiling of my essential unworthiness, just as Huck Finn was revealed to be a boy and not a girl by the way he threaded a needle. 

Yesterday, I arrived ill-prepared for a three-hour meeting of 84 people. There had been some documents in a vast beehive of Microsoft Teams for me to review two days before, and I hadn’t seen them till that morning. The queen bee herself greeted me by name, smiling at the door; I called her by the wrong name. As I sat with my work group, I noticed the gel polish curling off my fingernails at the sides. Stealthily under the table, I peeled off the little beetle shells and hid each one in my pocket till the break. No one seemed to be looking at me anyway. 

But how do I know? Everyone is so smooth and professional. Was there a flicker of a glance, a curl of a lip that I missed? Maybe they see the whole ritual and are disgusted. Like the mail carriers. 

Miss Manners, these inner squirmings are probably outside your remit. You are probably thinking, Write to Ann Landers. But she’s been dead since 2002, and I don’t really want to be told to wake up and smell the coffee. I smell it all the time. I guess what I really need to hear is that I am human; nothing human can be alien to me. And to hear it from someone I trust. Terence said it (Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto) but comedically, in his play The Self-Tormentor. Karl Marx said it, reportedly. Maya Angelou said it, definitely.

In the late seventies, a philosophy professor lectured us about a mechanical bee programmed to deliver the wrong signals in its waggle dance. The hive, we were told, went off to investigate the indicated nectar source. Finding none, they returned and broke their stingers against the metal waggle dancer, attempting to put her to death.

Fifty years later, I look up the story on Google. I read that worker bees are “highly skeptical” and follow others’ waggle-dance instructions only 10% of the time. If the directions delivered would lead to danger, the workers will administer a head butt, which briefly interrupts the dance. Young worker bees must learn the waggle dance; some never do it correctly, but are still allowed to live in the hive. Erroneous dances can actually improve the colony's life by leading it to forage more widely. In any case, “[a] simple mistake in choreography is not a death sentence.”

I’ll take that for now. Sorry to have bothered you, Miss Manners. And sorry, planet, for the harm I just did with that genAI search. I’ll try to make it up somehow.

Best, 

Beetle Box

© Cheryl Ceasar

Cheryl Ceasar

Cheryl Caesar is an ex- expatriate, having lived in Europe for 25 years before returning to her native Michigan. She teaches writing at Michigan State University and serves as president of the Michigan College English Association. Her chapbook of protest poetry, Flatman, is available from Amazon, and her poems and artwork appear in both volumes of Words across the Water (Fractal Edge Press). In 2024, she won first prize for prose in the “My Secret Lansing” contest sponsored by the Lansing Arts Council.

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