There Was An Old Lady

        I have some serious bones to pick with this outlandish children’s rhyme/tale. Most of my consternation lies with the old lady. She is obviously not well. No one in their right mind goes around shoveling wildlife down their gaping maw. I do not place any blame on the fly as other might. The end of every verse clearly states that the old woman swallowed the fly. There is no mention of the fly having any intention to be eaten. Then there is the logic of swallowing certain animals in the hope of catching other animals. There are two parts to this gaffe. First, I can understand the first attempt. Sure, swallow a spider to catch the fly. Spiders catch insects. Makes perfect sense. Except it doesn’t. Is the spider going to build a web inside the woman? Sounds more detrimental than helpful to me. After the spider things go wacky fast all the way up to a cow and a horse. Have you ever seen a cow chase anything? I haven’t. I have not seen a horse catch a cow either. This brings me to point number two. Does she have these animals trained? I do not see any other way she could possibly think that a goat would catch a dog, unless she had trained it specifically to do so. If this is the case, why in the heck would she do that? What possible scenario did she envision that she would need twelve different animals all trained to catch one of the others? No one has that kind of time! And wouldn’t they all be after each other all time or do they catch on command? Actually this is starting to sound like quite the impressive venture.

        The last major beef that I am going to mention here is the very last line of the story “she died of course.” This is referring to the old lady scarfing down the horse. I fail to see how, at this juncture, it is obvious that her actions would kill her. Think about it. This person just consumed an entire cow and was then still spritely enough to get a horse in her mouth and swallowed. If a cow didn’t at least seriously slow her down, I fail to see how a horse could kill her. Unless the horse kicked her from the inside or something and caused internal trauma. How does she even open her mouth that wide? She must be eating them whole, otherwise the story would run a little differently. “She swallowed the ton of horse meat to catch the fifteen hundred pounds of steak…” What a dumb lady. People eat bugs all the time. Just suck it up and move on. No need to clear out the farm.

“We need you.”
“More than you know.”
“Not that much.”