Watch out for bridge abutments – and never inhale a moth

My husband and I were reading in bed when I suddenly rolled up my New Yorker and swatted at a bug.

“What are you doing?” he asked with some irritation since the mattress was still vibrating.

“Trying to kill a bug.”

“What kind of a bug?” he pursued, with some concern.

“Just a moth,” I said.

“A moth!” he repeated. “Don’t kill it in the bed! We don’t want to inhale a moth!”

“Inhale a moth!” I repeated in amazement. “I didn’t even know that was something I had to worry about!” Here I was, an accomplished worrier about things even remotely likely to happen and I didn’t even know moths were on the list.

My children will all vouch that I am a world-class worrier about obscure dangers. We seldom have a family get-together that they do not remind me of the many hazards I warned them about as they were growing up, particularly as they turned into teenagers and then, frighteningly, into teenage drivers.

Bridge abutments is what they remember the most. Every day there was a story about someone crashing into a bridge abutment so my three sons never left the house, even to drive to the store a bridgeless half-block away, that I did not admonish them: “Watch out for bridge abutments.”

Lightning was something else to avoid. You had to watch out for lightning on golf courses although, they kept reminding me when they were 3, 5 and 7, they weren’t often on a golf course.

You had to watch out for lightning when you were standing in a barn. We lived in town, they pointed out. You had to watch out for lightning driving tractors, on the baseball field and just standing in your own back door.

High water, I warned them, was fraught with danger. “Don’t walk in it,” I said. “Don’t drive in it, particularly when there are electrical wires loose and floating in the high water.”

I didn’t make these hazards up. I was constantly reading of people who these things happened to.

“Don’t dive into a swimming pool and hit your head on the bottom,” I warned them when I once read about such an accident.

Watch out for black widow and brown recluse spiders, stinging scorpions and rattlesnakes, I cautioned as they headed for a hike in the pasture or a climbing expedition out in the Wichitas.

They could have become nervous nellies, I suppose, from listening to my daily dose of “be carefuls,” “watch outs,” and “don’t do’s.”

But of course they didn’t.

I think the day they stopped pretending to listen was the day we were all at the supper table and I said, “Don’t ever go to sleep in a rice field.”

“Why not?” they all three asked in fascinated unison, their forks suspended in mid-air.

“Because I read today where a child went to sleep in a rice field in India and was swallowed by a boa constrictor,” I informed them solemnly.

They promised that if they ever found themselves in a rice field in western Oklahoma, they’d keep a sharp eye out for boa constrictors.

Just because they’re grown men now doesn’t mean I can relax. I warn them about cholesterol, admonish them to use sun screen and periodically bring up bridge abutments.

And now, I thought, reaching over to turn out the lamp, I will tell them not to inhale a moth.

Mary McClure is a former newspaper editor who lives in Lawton.