Charlotte's Bad Day

I ain't 'fraid of spiders.

I will readily admit that I don't want a spider crawling across my face, as long as he stays in his corner, and I stay in mine, we'll get along fine.
I have had several generations of spiders living behind a statue in my living room. They catch flies, moths, mosquitoes, etc. (If he's on my face in the middle of the night, that story will end altogether differently!)

I had a spider living in the back of my truck all summer several years ago.

When I drove to work in the morning, I would tell him, "Hold on! We're going to work!" After I got to work, I inspected his web, and all the finer threads had been blown out by the wind, leaving him with only the main structure of the web. He would have the web completely repaired when I got off work, and I would tell him, "Hold on! We're going home!" When I parked my truck in front of my apartment, I noticed that his web had been once again reduced to just the main threads. He would have it repaired before morning, and our cycle would start all over again - the entire summer.

One morning, early in the fall, I walked into the office that I did medical billing (shirt / tie job). I poked my head over the short cubicle wall to talk to a co-worker before the day started. She said, "Michael, you have something on your neck!", and she started clawing at her own neck, indicating that I should mimic her motions to get the offending foreign object off my neck.

I did as she compelled me to do. With one quick motion, I flicked my hand, in a fast swiping motion across my neck. The movement was too fast for me to see, but I could tell by her wide open mouth and bulging eyes that I hit my target. That poor spider choose a bad day to leave the bed of my truck, and accompany me into the office. HE was the 'offending object'. With one swoop, I flicked him from my neck smack dab in the middle of her forehead!

My 'slightly' frightened co-worker jumped up from her desk - screaming and cussing - ran through this HUGE, crowded quiet office on high heels that she couldn't handle under such circumstances. In cartoon-style, she was bouncing off the walls of every cubicle down the hallway, screaming, yelling....cussing..... all the way out off the office.

My poor, carpooling spidey met an unfortunate demise that morning.

(As for me, I was curled up in a ball on the floor of my cubicle - in shirt, tie and dress pants, laughing so hard that I was crying my eyes out!)

When I was a child, my mother would find an innocent little garter snake in the garden.

Actually, he was just doing his job - eating grasshoppers, etc, that ate the vegetables.

The only time in my life that I have ever seen my mother move this quickly, she would post me to keep an eye on the poor little snake, and she would RUN to the garage to get a garden hoe to chop the poor little thing into pieces.

I had to make a decision:

Either spare the life of an innocent creature that has every much of a right to live unharmed as the large, scary creature that was trying to kill him, or I had to personally face the wrath of the large, psychotic creature that had a weapon in her hand.

(Remember - I am blind in my left eye. That isn't ALWAYS a downfall or a curse!)

Many, many times, while she was running to the garage, I would scare the little snake away.

When she got back with the hoe, demanding, "Where did it go? Where did it go?", I would put on my best acting front, and I would throw up my hands, shrug my shoulders, and say, "I don't know where HE went! You know I can't see very well, and it's getting dark out here!"

(Notice how I made the snake a LIVING, breathing being by calling HIM a HIM, rather than an "IT". To this day, I loathe when people call ANY animal - or their babies! an "IT", and I will correct them every time I get a chance!)

Long live the little snake! Every snake on my property will live his natural life, unless he runs into a hawk, which becomes a deal between him and the hawk, and I stay out of that fight as much as possible.

(That woman never did figure out that almost every time, *I* was the one that chased the snake away!)
- Michael