Spiders and Frodo to Go
As ugly as they are, spiders have power. Not just the gargantuan mass that threatens to destroy Frodo in “Return of the King,” or the disgusting dominance of one obese Jabba the Hut, who resembles a spider whose legs have been pulled off by an obnoxious boy. No, to the innocent male child spiders draw the imagination like the wailing sirens of the Morlock’s underground lair in “The Time Machine.”
When I was a child in rural Idaho we had a colony of Opiliones, or daddy-long-legs, living in our basement. Weekly their numbers grew with the immigration of spider cousins who liked the fertile dirt that nourished the famous Idaho potato. Now that I think about it, there must have been as many of the long-legged creatures in our basement as there were potatoes in the neighbor’s fields.
At the young age of six I was assigned a bedroom in the basement. One sister and older brother had bedrooms there, too. But my oldest sister somehow escaped the creepy basement and lived upstairs with three younger brothers. She must have been the favorite child, something I didn’t realize at the time.
My morning went something like this: wake up, jump up, run out of the room and go upstairs. Hope to never return.
My bedtime went something like this: trudge downstairs, lift all the blankets and look for spiders. Regret throwing PJs on the floor that morning. Say extra sincere prayers which included preservation requests regarding spiders. Climb in bed. When second oldest sister finally settles down in bedroom next door, get up and go in and ask to climb in bed with her. Sometimes worked.
During one of those occasions which I’d managed to needle my way into my sister’s bedroom we heard on the radio that Marilyn Monroe had died, and something about pills. We didn’t know what to do about this information other than use it as fodder for our pretend games. Sad, of course. Just like the spiders.
If I was traumatized by the appearance of spiders my sister’s experience would have been more like Ripley’s in “Alien.” I know, you don’t want to read this.
Well, Sister, whose name shall be kept confidential, woke up one night coughing and sputtering. It was a night I wasn’t in her bed. I would never say her prayers weren’t as sincere as mine. But, the truth of the matter is, one ugly, hairy, long-legged, didn’t-have-any-business-being-there spider ended up in her mouth.
Oh, the sadness the memory brings.
If I could just express this sorrow to my grandsons, I’m sure they would abandon their crazy fascination with the eight-legged mutants.
Sometimes children don’t listen. My son tells me that the average human swallows 26 spiders in a lifetime. I want to state unequivocally that I am not an average human and I swallow zero spiders in my lifetime. There is even a correspondent of some kind who reported the belief that the “average” human swallows a pound of spiders–that would be 20,000—in a lifetime.
Come on people. We don’t swallow spiders. We smash them.
Any belief otherwise is just an urban legend which was promoted by a book published in 1954. And that is final.
Sorry, Sister-who-shall-not-be-named, you were the token human who had to swallow a spider. Never again!