There was an old lady who swallowed a fly.
I don’t know why she swallowed a fly.
Perhaps she’ll die.
This was a popular nursery song when I was a kid and though I thought it was funny, it horrified me on some level. This poor, misguided woman swallowed a spider to catch the fly, a bird to catch the spider, a cat to catch the bird, a dog to catch the cat, a cow to catch the dog and a horse to catch the cow.
Somehow, she survived swallowing all these creatures, except the last one. She died after swallowing the horse.
What was wrong with this woman?
To begin with, who gave her the idea that swallowing a fly might be so life-threatening that she would need to swallow a spider right way to catch the darned thing? She was acting on some pretty lousy information and I maintain that whoever fed her this lie should have been held responsible for it.
But after swallowing the spider, the next five things she swallowed are entirely on her. I can’t imagine anyone advising her to swallow a bird to catch the spider, or a cat to catch the bird, and a dog to catch the cat. But at least those actions have some relation to reality. A bird will catch a spider, a cat will go after a bird and a dog will chase a cat. After that, the woman comes unhinged. Since when would a cow be sent out to catch a dog? Even more bizarre, when has a horse ever caught a cow?
However, I will give this woman a few points on her ability to swallow things and if she had had the good sense to stop after digesting the cow, she might still be with us. But the horse was just a step too far.
I never saw a photo of this woman but I am going to go out on a limb here and suggest that she must have had one hell of a big mouth.
Which is probably how that fly got into her in the first place.
She yawned what would turn out to be a fatal yawn at just the wrong time. The fly went to investigate and soon it was sharing her obviously oversized stomach with a spider, a bird, a cat, a dog, a cow and a horse.
What a tragic series of events. For not only the old lady but all these innocent creatures.
The good news is that, too my knowledge, no human since then has ever repeated such a string of colossal errors.
So, from that point of view, the old lady did us all a great favour by showing us the dangers of having a big mouth and of opening it at the wrong time.
It is sad she had to die but she left the world a better place.
As did the reporter who broke the story.
©2015 Jim Hagarty
