A New Slant on a Traditional Tale
by Bob Quinn
Once upon a time an ant was toiling in the hot sun on his salt anthill when another ant from a nearby neighborhood happened by. The newcomer attempted to strike up a friendly conversation with the ant on the hill of salt. After they had exchanged greetings the newcomer remarked: “Isn’t it wonderful how sweet our anthills are?” You see, the ant out for a stroll came from a place where the anthills were made of sugar, and he had mistaken the salt in front of him for sugar. The salt ant replied that he must be crazy, it was just salt, there was no such thing as sweet, that sweet was just an old wives’ tale for people who couldn’t deal with the harsh reality of salt. Life was salt, day after day, salt and nothing else. People who couldn’t handle that made up stories like the existence of sweetness. Sweetness, Easter Ant, Santa Ant, they were all fairy tales for little kids. He was too busy working for such nonsense.
The sugar ant, curious now, approached the salt hill and took a little taste. “Oh my. I see now why you say what you do. This is not sweet at all. But, my friend, there really is such a thing as sweet. It’s not at all like Santa Ant or other stories we tell our children. I am telling you no folktale, no fairy tale. I eat sugar each and every day, and it is indeed sweet. Sweet is a wonderful taste. It can change your life and make it a joy. Without it, though, I do see how you can say what you do.”
“Joy my foot!” The salt ant appeared angry or threatened by the notion of a joyful life. “I am happy here working in the sun. Someone has to move this salt around. If I didn’t do it, then who would? That’s all the so-called joy I need. Your joy is wishful thinking, and dangerous to boot!”
The sugar ant listened respectfully, thought for a moment, and then realized he had a few grains of sugar with him in his pocket. It was his habit to keep nibbling on sugar all day long. He took one little piece of sugar out and showed it to the salt ant. “My friend, come here and try a taste of sugar so you can know the beauty of sweet.”
The salt ant took one look at the sugar. “Do you take me for a fool? You’ve got salt in your hand. It’s white, and it is a crystal. Believe me, I know salt. You just want me to imagine some wonderful experience and fool myself about what is really just the same plain, old salt. No, sir, I’ll not waste my time.” With that he turned away and started to work again.
The sugar ant was perplexed by the salt ant’s unwillingness to even try a little taste, but when he considered it, he realized how stuck the poor fellow was in his salty experience of life. “No, no, no, my friend, please trust me on this. Just open your mouth and try a taste. What do you have to lose?”
The salt ant considered the sugar ant’s words. “OK, I will try a taste, but if it is as I suspect, just salt, I will not look kindly at you and your nonsense about sweetness.” He opened his mouth, and the sugar ant placed a tiny grain of sugar on his tongue. The salt ant sucked on it and considered the taste of this sugar. It was indeed somewhat different from his typical salt, but it wasn’t all that different. There was still much about it that was salty. In fact, it was probably ninety-nine percent salty.
“Sir, you are a fraud. I bid you good day.” With that comment the salt ant returned to his work.
“I don’t understand,” said the sugar ant, hurrying after him. “That was sugar. You should have tasted sweetness.”
“At best, sir, it was impure salt. I will admit it tasted somewhat different from my everyday salt here, but it was still very salty. You’re making a big deal about nothing as far as I can see. Please get off my hill and leave me alone. For the life of me, now that I’ve tasted your so-called wonderful sweetness, I can’t understand how it got to be such a tale. The difference was hardly noticeable. Humph! People and their foolishness.”
The sugar ant walked away, shaking his head in confusion as he went. How had the sugar failed to taste sweet for the salt ant? It worked for him every time he ate it. Then he had a sudden insight and rushed back to the salt ant.
“I understand now, my friend, why the sugar did not taste sweet to you. Please, let me take a look inside your mouth.”
“Sir, I asked you to leave me alone. You had your chance. You have wasted enough of my time. Don’t you see all the important work I have to do here? Someone has to move all this salt around. I am quite content in the knowledge that life is salt. I do not need you to save me from this reality. I am happy enough already.” The salt ant’s perpetual frown seemed to say otherwise, thought the sugar ant, but he decided to hold his tongue.
“I am not out to save you, my friend, and do not know where you got this notion. I just want to show you that there is such a thing as sweet. What you choose to do after that is none of my business. Now, please, let me look in your mouth.”
“Oh, I don’t know why I’m wasting more of my time on you, but if it’ll get rid of you once and for all…” He opened his mouth. When the sugar ant peeked into the salt ant’s mouth, his insight was confirmed. The poor ant had been eating salt day-in and day-out for so long that his mouth was crusted over with old salt. The sugar ant chipped away at some of the large pieces of salt and removed them. He then took another grain of sugar from his pocket and put it on the ant’s tongue.
“My friend, please suck on that a little.”
The salt ant’s smile spread so wide that he thought for a moment it would rip his face, and tears of joy rolled down his cheeks. Now he looked at the sugar ant with new understanding.
“I can’t believe it. It is so wonderful. Just like you said. I’ve never tasted anything like that. What did you do? How come it didn’t taste like that the first time?”
“My friend, you have been existing on a diet of salt for so long that it has become practically a part of you. It is caked-on all over in your mouth. You carry it with you everywhere, and it colors everything you taste. I removed enough of it so you could finally experience real sweet. If you stay away from salt and take some sugar every day, it will slowly dissolve all that old salt. The sweet will get much sweeter as the salt dissolves.”
“You mean it can get better than this?” The possibility of this wonderful taste getting even sweeter excited him.
“Oh, it can get much better. I only took out of your mouth what would come out easily and quickly. Some of the really old salt will take consistent sugar-eating every day to dissolve it. But it will be worth it. Believe me, sweet will get so much sweeter all the time. Eventually, if you really stick with it, salty will become a rare experience. You’ll look back with amazement that you ever managed to live a day without sugar.”
“But, sir, I work with salt every day. I push it around, I lift it and move it. How can I avoid the salty taste?”
“My friend, that is simple. You have to do your work, that is clear, and there is nothing wrong with that. No, nothing wrong with it at all. But the salty taste comes from putting salt in your mouth, not from just working with it. So, the answer to your question is to work with sugar in your mouth. Do your work on the salt hills as best you can, but keep taking a little sugar throughout the day. In short: Don’t eat the salt, eat sugar.”
“Sir, I thank you so much for introducing me to sugar’s sweetness. You’ve changed the way I see life. Now I’m aware there is another possibility for me, not just salt every day. You say I should keep a little sugar in my mouth through the day and that it will slowly dissolve the old sugar and keep the sweet taste in my mouth, but it occurs to me that I don’t know how to find more sugar. Do I have to wait for you to come back? Where will I go to find more. I need to eat something after all, and if I cannot find sugar, I will surely keep eating salt.”
“Oh, that is an easy problem to solve. Look over there.” The sugar ant turned the salt ant around and pointed to his neighborhood of sugar anthills a short distance away.
“Over there is all sugar. All these years it was so close, and you never knew it. It was easy to miss since it looks a lot like salt. There is no end to the sugar over there, and there is no salt. If you go over there you can trust anything you pick up. It will be sweet. You are welcome to come any time and enjoy all the sweet you want. I suggest you come over every day and load up on sugar. You can carry some it with you when you come back here to your own hill. You can even take enough to build a sugar hill. You could leave this salt hill for good if you wanted.”
“Sir, I am amazed that so much sugar is that close to me. All these years I never knew it. Without that first taste of sweet, if you had pointed to all those sugar hills and told me they were sugar, and not salt, I never would have believed you. Thank you, once again.”
“You’re most welcome, my friend. Remember to come every day to get sugar. It won’t walk over here and bite you on the nose, and it won’t scream and jump up and down for your attention. You have to go over and get it yourself. There’s no other way. And remember to keep salt out of your mouth. You won’t believe how good sugar will taste once the old salt is gone.”
“I’ll remember. I want sweet in my life, and I know now how to get it. It isn’t as if I had to climb Mount Everest or sleep on a bed of nails to get more sugar. It could hardly be any closer.”
“Just to be sure, my friend, I think I’ll stop by every now and then to visit. I’ll bring some of my best sugar with me when I come. We can sit and visit and talk about how wonderful sugar is. It’ll be a sort of reminder for you, just in case you fall back into your salt-eating ways. How will that be? Would you like regular visits?”
“Sir, I am forever grateful to you for the help you’ve given me, and I find your company quite agreeable. You are a wise and clear-seeing ant. Regular visits sound like a lovely idea.”
And so, from time to time the sugar ant would come and visit his new friend, each time bringing his sweetest sugar along to share. Sometimes he found the salt ant had removed lots of old salt from his mouth and was able to enjoy the sugar and his company. Other times the sugar ant found the salt ant grumpy and out of sorts, a sure sign that he was eating salt regularly again. The salt ant would complain that it was too hard to walk over to the sugar hill every single day, he needed a rest from it all, he’d get back to it soon, and in the meanwhile salt was not so bad after all, he had taken a course in Nouveau Salt Cuisine in which he had learned clever ways of preparing salt, he had met a sexy salt ant and they enjoyed their salt together, and he had figured out how to ski down his salt hill and have fun with it…
On those visits, as on the first visit, the sugar ant helped him remove salt from his mouth before giving him the treasured, top-shelf sugar. Each time the renewed taste of sweet brought the salt ant back to his practice of visiting the sugar hill every day.
Then one day the sugar ant came to the salt ant to say his final farewell. “I am going to die soon, my friend. I am old and my time has come, as it does one day for all ants. I have come to say goodbye. I want to share with you one final thing my sugar teacher told me long ago: It is said by many teachers, that practice makes perfect, but this is not quite right. Actually, practice tends to make permanent. If you practice going to the salt hill and eating there, you will gain no perfection worthy of the name. You will have only the permanent habit of salt eating—permanent, that is, until, if you are fortunate, you create a new practice. So, my friend, be wise. That was my teacher’s advice. Be careful and pay attention to what your practice is. Pay attention to what you’re putting into your mouth from moment-to-moment—is it salt, or is it sugar? Remember, he said to me, if your practice is saltiness, it is not reasonable to expect a life of sweetness. I leave you now, my friend. You know now the difference between salt and sugar. Be wise in what you practice.”
With a final smile the sugar ant turned and walked away, never to be seen again. But his teaching remained. The salt ant built a solid practice of sugar-eating, and, as the years passed, his life became sweeter and sweeter, just as the sugar ant had promised. He told his neighbors about sweetness and helped many of them build happier lives full of sugar.
Then, one day, death came for him too. He left this world of anthills, salt, and sugar a happy and grateful ant, an ant who had once thought of himself as a salt ant, but now considered himself a sugar ant. In his final breath he blessed his friend. Through his kindness a life of salt had been turned into a gift of sweetness.