Third Avenue Gem

Do you ever cheat when you walk across the street? You know: you start walking in a perfect perpendicular line to the street you're crossing, but then you cut a corner and veer inward toward the middle of your destination block to save time, or because you're lazy, or just because you can.

So I was crossing Third this morning and did that veering thing towards the front of the downtown Seattle YMCA, and watch out! I'm glad I didn't veer more, as I would have stepped on him. The roach was just hanging out on the sidewalk about 8" from the curb. I stopped and poked him with the toe of my shoe (clog, actually). Yep. Alive.

Mr. Roach

Mr. Roach, in context

But look at him; isn't he kind of pretty? You can see why insects have inspired beautiful jewelry for thousands of years. They possess symmetry, combine pleasing, rounded shape with strange, wiry appendages, and their armored exoskeletons are so opposite of our own anatomy.

Egyptian gold ring inlaid with lapis
lazuli scarab and glass, 1350 B.C.
Image credit: Susie Ward Aber

When I saw the King Tutankhamun exhibit in 1978, I really loved the scarabs. Whodda thunk someone could get so inspired by a beetle that they'd create something so beautiful?

I'm no entomologist, but I do want to clarify that roaches and scarabs, while related to the level of the infraclass Neoptera, belong to different superorders and orders. Scarabs are beetles of the order Coleoptera, and roaches Blattaria (as are termites). I also want to come clean and clarify that this insect taxonomy thing is stuff that I had to look up to write about it.

About 30,000 scarab species exist, and Egyptians long ago viewed the sacred scarab as a form of the sun god Khepri. I don't know if there have been any cultures that viewed the cockroach as the embodiment of a god. Perhaps we could make the roach the "God of the Unsanitized Gym Shower Stall," or "He Who Waves in Delight at the Midnight Restaurant Dumpster Bounty."

For a lovely story about an insect pet and information on actual bejeweled beetles, check out The Holy Enchilda's blog.