The Story of the Ants
When Mike was a kid, he read Aesop’s fable, The Ants and the Grasshopper, and was crushed. The moral favored the Ants. By nature, he was a grasshopper. He felt for the grasshopper and identified with his summertime ebullience. Was it Mike’s fate to be coldly rejected, starved, and frozen because, by nature, he was not like those who could survive winter? He spent many years slugging out internal arguments with the good shepherd Aesop until he finally resolved this internal conflict by telling The Story of the Ants.
Just in case you don’t know or forgot, here is Aesop’s The Grasshopper and The Ant for reference.
THE Ants were employing a fine winter’s day in drying grain collected in the summer time. A Grasshopper, perishing with famine, passed /by and earnestly begged for a little food.
The Ants inquired of him, “Why did you not treasure up food during the summer?”
He replied, “I had not leisure enough. I passed the days in singing.”
They then said in derision: “If you were foolish enough to sing all the summer, you must dance supperless to bed in the winter.”
Aesop's The Ants and the Grasshopper , by Aesop
The Story of the Ants (a summary)
The Hague Committee, assigned to preserve historical legends, documented this report on The Story of the Ants. The Ants lived in the rubble at the bottom of a cliff at the sea’s edge. They survived by hard work and rules—strict rules governed all their actions. The most important of these was never grabbing the balloon string.
All the Ants obeyed the rules except for the ant Noodles. He learned the rules, but obeying them was beyond him.
One day, he saw a balloon string, and he grabbed it.
What came next was freedom until the spiders and wasps arrived.
