Sarah, like most of my former classmates at Xavier, is a good deal younger than I am. She's witty. She's fun to hang around with. She was the driving force behind an almost successful attempt at starting a philosophy club. I'd wanted to stay in touch with her after my graduation but real life, as they say, intervened. Between work, fixing up the dilapidated houses I inherited from my father and then returning to school to take Latin and Greek on my lunch break, I just never found the motivation to make the time to stay in contact with someone who didn't haunt the same haunts that I did.

Scholarship to Catholic University freshly in hand, I called her up and invited her over to dinner. Dinner was very nice, pleasant and uneventful until that fateful moment when Sarah mentioned that she intended to arrange an outing for the purpose of hunting and preparing a meal made from 17 year cicadas. Little did she know that my desire to do that very thing the previous emergence of cicadas in 2004 was frustrated only by lack of anyone else interested in such a  project. I quickly pulled the recipe book that I had been storing on my hard drive for the past 4 years and we set a tentative date for Monday night.

My family had different reactions. My eldest daughter stated flatly that she wasn't going to go. My youngest daughter seemed like she almost but not quite wanted to go. When I opined, `you know you want to,' her response was `I'll do it if you pay me.' My wife said, `You are not cooking them here. You aren't bringing any home with you. You will not allow any cicadas into the house. I'm not even going to let you kiss me after you come home.'

The time from Friday evening to Monday evening dragged by slowly. A bit of research was done. Where do cicadas hang out? Which ones taste best? How do you tell the males from the females? The important answers were that, if you can't get ones that are newly emerged from the ground and still green, go for the females. They can be identified by having an acute rather than rounded abdomen and lacking the organs that make the loud chattering noise which the males make to attract the females. Having missed the peak of Brood XIV, we decided that the place to venture out to was a county park on the north and east side of the city. And so that we did.

The party ended up being Sarah, Sarah's friend Steve and myself. We made a very unlikely group. Steve, the stereotypical Queen, squealed like a girl everytime a cicada came close to him. Sarah kept chuckling over her sadistic desire to watch her girlfriend Valerie squirm while she ate a cicada. Me, I just laughed at them both and at myself, looking forward to trying something gross and repulsive.

All together we spent about an hour in the thick of the woods along a creek looking for the critters. We caught less then 10 live females before the light started to fail. Steve had the best eye for finding them but lacked the will to so much as touch them let alone catch them, check their abdomen to determine whether they were male or female, and put them in the brown paper bags we all carried. Most of what we found were zombie cicadas, still alive but half disintegrated into nothingness. In some cases, just the head, legs and wings remained crawling around aimlessly. In other cases, we found whole cicadas perched, dead, the red of their eyes faded to a dim white. We also found many males which instantly kicked up a chattering ruckus when caught and which we returned to their perches once they did so. The adult males, the internet informed us, don't taste so good.

Once we exited the forest we found bazillions and bazillions of the creatures on the leaves of the last line of trees, as if holding onto the last rays of the setting sun lest they turn into the sort of zombies we found deep within the forest. Here it was that Steve found his inner courage and caught one before jumping up and down with excitement, `I did it! I did it! I did it all by myself!' No longer did his bag hold only the one that Sarah had put there for pity's sake. Rather, it held the fruits of his own hunting of wild things. Like the true man Sarah and I both knew he was, Steve was about to eat what he had hunted and killed with his own bare hands.

With the daylight gone we drove back to Sarah's bad where we met up with Valerie and blanched the cicadas. Once blanched, we pulled off their wings, heads and legs. I was the first to eat one. Then Valerie and Steve. Sarah, the one who had instigated the whole project, tried very hard to wimp out. `Sarah!' I yelled. Her shame got the best of her and she did that which was needful. The remainder we stirred into the pad thai that Sarah put together.

The taste, it must be said, is quite pleasant. Very similar to asparagus, the insides are smooth and creamy. The exoskeleton, however, has a very nasty texture. I can see why so many of the recipes available on the Internet recommend finding newly emerged cicadas whose exoskeletons have not yet hardened. The grossness, I think, is mostly psychological. Bugs make many people squeamish; intentionally eating bugs, more so.

Soon after I consumed my plate of cicada pad thai, the time came for me to depart. I shook hands with my new friends Valerie and Steve, gave Sarah a quick hug and departed. My new adventures I'm about to embark on in grad school at Catholic University will almost certainly be more difficult than capturing and eating dim witted and slow flying insects. But I don't know that they will be more interesting. Nor can I imagine a better way to say goodbye to a woman whom I shared part of my discover of the love of knowledge with.

And next time I'm going to try dipping the cicadas in chocolate.