The Aztec secret

This morning is the day that the garbage truck picks up tree prunings along with the regular garbage and so I spent a little time cutting the dead leaves from our Mexican Fan Palms. The leaves are tricky to work around because they have razor sharp spikes along the fronds and I've been caught by surprise on many occasions. One morning I was mowing the lawn near one of the palms when a spike caught my thumb as I passed by. The mower kept my hand moving forward and the spike made its best attempt to hold my hand back, but the Honda 5 horse power engine won out and my poor thumb lost a large patch of skin. Anyway, as I was trimming the palm trees this morning I was suddenly grabbed by one of the sharp spikes as my head was rubbing against the leaf above me, or at least that's what I imagined until I heard a loud buzzing very close to my right ear. The spot where I'd been spiked was in my right temple and it turned out that a large Yellow Jacket, part of a small nest of Yellow Jackets, had stung my temple. There was sudden fire and my right eye closed instinctively as I jumped out of the palm tree's umbrage yelling “The little booger! The little booger!”

I walked into the house, my face on fire, and continued to repeat “The little booger!” Candace asked me what was going on, half horrified and half chuckling. “I was just stung by a wasp and my face is on fire. Do we have some Calamine lotion?” I always kept a large bottle of Calamine in the medicine closet for just such emergencies but it was no longer there. My two years in Iraq and moving our home and going through Hurricane Ike had somehow made my large bottle disappear. “I don't think we have any Calamine, but I have some healing mud from Egypt.” I wasn't sure about what to think. Healing mud from Egypt? Sounded fishy. Candace removed a large jar from the closet but her eyes must be suffering a little bit because there was, indeed, a pyramid on the label but the name of the product was “Aztec Secret.” My confidence level dropped a bit. I've lived in Latin America and I've been around the places where the Aztec civilization once flourished, but I suddenly wondered why, if this was the “Aztec Secret,” did all of the Aztecs disappear? Maybe this was the secret of their sudden, mystifying disappearance and Candace was plotting something.

She opened the jar and handed it to me. It was full of fine dust. “Just put some into a little dish and mix it with water.” My right eye was pegged closed because of the continuous fiery pain and I realized that maybe death wouldn't have been so bad right then. I tapped some dust onto the edge of the sink (since I didn't want to waste my time looking for some tiny porcelain apothecary bowl) and mixed a little water with it. I picked up the thick paste on the end of my finger and, closing the other eye, rubbed it onto my flaming temple. The pain vanished! It was immediate! It was a miracle! Or maybe I had just died and all of my pain had suddenly ceased! No, I was still alive! My right eye popped open.

When I went back to investigate the palm tree I found a nest of Yellow Jackets adding on to their mud hut on the underside of the leaf that I'd been rubbing against during my pruning episode. I'll use more caution the next time I prune. That's what wisdom is—learning from our mistakes and our lack of wisdom in order to acquire the ability to correctly apply knowledge. And, of course, there's always the “Aztec Secret.”