The Monster cricket

In suburban Louisville where Jimmy Raney lived, there were a lot of crickets out at night. But at some point one of them managed to find a home right outside his front door of the apartment complex (perhaps in a door frame or nearby hallway plant). In the beginning he was curious how this cricket came to be displaced but with a small hallway as a sounding board, and with the cricket showing no signs of leaving, this nightly sound became quite irritating. Finally my father decided to take matters into his own hands. The next night when the cricket started his nightly song, he put a cassette tape recorder just behind the door with the mic turned up and recorded the chirping event for a good while. The next night, the cricket came back again right on schedule for another “recording session”. But right in the middle, he flipped the recorder’s play switch with the previous night’s chirping AT FULL VOLUME. After letting the tape go for a bit, he turned it off and listened for the cricket. Nothing. complete dead silence.

Apparently, my father surmised, this cricket was faced with the realization that a gargantuan monster cricket was apparently living just on the other side of the door and that he had better make haste and find another chirping perch pronto if he knew what was good for him. Needless to say, Dad never had the cricket issue again and had probably established a modern and frightening cricket legend to be passed on to generations of young crickets to come.