Me and spiders - a true story about the little things

[la_belle_laide]

I've kind of been itching to tell this story for a while. The other day, a few people on Twitter were talking about how they were killing spiders because they were scary, dangerous, gross, etc. I came to the defense of spiders because really, there are only 3 or 4 dangerous ones in the continental US. Most of them will leave an itchy, burning mark on you, at the most. And they probably don't even want to bite you. Yellowjacket stings are much worse.

So anyway, I'm going to tell this story about me and spiders, and I'm going to tell it exactly how I remember it. This is going back 22 years, but my memory is, to be honest, pretty frigging amazing at the best of times. (Partly because I've kept diaries since I could write. But anyway.)

Spiders and I haven't always been cool together. I mean, we do go way way back, but it isn't a "since the beginning of time" thing. In fact, it's really since I was 16 that spiders and I have been cool, and this is the story of how that happened.

I was 16, and it was the summer before senior year, 1989.



Hair-metal was on its way out, Faith No More on its way in. As for me, I was just about to get into Pink Floyd, Syd Barrett, David Bowie, T. Rex. I was still deeply into The Beatles, harboring an undying crush on John Lennon.

I was a bit Goth, before Goth was Goth. With the dyed jet black hair, the black clothes, a torn, satin jacket that had the words "ROCK N ROLL" blazoned across the back in silver glitter – a gift from my brother, years ago. I'd wear it over equally torn flannel shirts. This was before flannel became The Thing To Wear, but we northerners were ahead of the curve on this one. (Flannel was just plain warm.)

I was obsessed with Arthurian legend. Anything having to do with King Arthur, with the Knights of the Round Table, the grail, Camelot, any of that stuff, I ate it up. Of course, this was before the internet, so I had to actually get books out of the library and such.

I spent my nights staying awake until 3 AM "working" on various screenplays and paintings at an easel in my parents' living room after they went to bed. As I wrote and painted (switching back and forth between the two,) I would always either be watching "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" or "A Fish Called Wanda." My love of loves was Michael Palin. That summer, I watched Holy Grail 288 times before I lost count.

I'd always take glances up to the skylight, to see if the moon was out.

So one night, around the middle of summer, I glanced up to the skylight and saw this bigass black spider chilling on the moulding.

At this point, spiders and I were not cool. I'd see a spider, and I'd run for the can of RAID. (Raid. Me. I was a different person back then.) Spiders terrified me and I was convinced that they terrorized me on purpose, like all bugs, which I hated. I'd spray them like crazy and wouldn't stop spraying until I was sure they'd never move a spindly leg again.

So, like any other night I ran for the can of Raid, my skin crawling. Poison in hand, I shook the bottle and aimed it up at the skylight. You're going down, you creepy bastard. I had my finger on the trigger.

But I didn't spray it. I stood there staring at this beast, convinced that it was staring back at me. I remember exactly what it looked like up there. It wiggled its two front legs, the way spiders do when they're doing spider-things. I don't know, I just stood there looking up at it, waiting for it to do something, and it didn't.

I thought, What sort of witch is afraid of spiders? If you think about it, aren't they kind of spooky and cool looking? I think that the Goth part of me was like, Is it really cool to kill them? Wouldn't it be cooler to be friends with them?

So I lowered the can of Raid, thinking, Just this one spider. I'll let this one live and see how that goes.

Then, the spider started to come down on its web. There was a wood and glass table under the skylight back then, where I'd keep all my important papers with ideas for novels, and movies and such. I freaked out again and backed up until I hit the sofa.

"Get back up there," I told the spider. "You just get back up there and maybe I won't spray you."

It stopped on its web and dangled there for a few seconds, spinning. Then it turned itself around and climbed back up.

Hmm.

"How about this," I told it. "You stay up there, out of my way, and you can do whatever. If you come down and start walking around the walls or the table, you get sprayed. Do we have a deal?"

It didn't mind me, as spiders don't actually speak Human. It just climbed back on up and went about making a web and doing spider things.

A few days passed and no one else seemed to notice it. As far as I knew, it hadn't come down. It just hung out up in the corner of the skylight, in its web.

I'd watch it every night, to make sure. As I painted, watched my movies, wrote my stories, whatever else. Just peeking up there and telling it, "You stay put, now."

Eventually, I decided that the spider was male, and I named him Gareth, after one of King Arthur's knights. The naming seemed to cement whatever agreement I had with this spider. Once I name something, I take responsibility for it; that kind of goes with everything and I've always been that way.



I can't remember if it was my Dad or Mom who finally noticed it and got the can of Raid one day. I just remember shouting "DON'T! THAT'S GARETH."

I was a weird kid and both my parents knew that. I could be a little difficult to put up with at times, obviously something of a drama-queen, and often reveling in my own outreness that I know was irritating to people. My parents put up with a lot.

So, I explained the situation to them: I was trying to like spiders, and this one had been there for a few days and hadn't harmed anything, and we needed to let him stay up there because it was important,it was important for me to like spiders. Gareth was a pet and not to be sprayed, swatted, vacuumed, squished, harmed or molested in any way.

My folks side-eyed me but mostly shrugged this off.

After a few weeks, it came to a point where they would both greet the spider in the morning, with a "And hello, Gareth." Never let it be said that my parents didn't indulge my ridiculous whims.

But then eventually the "And hello Gareth"s became less eye-rolly and more actually affectionate. House-guests (usually just friends and cousins) came to know about Gareth the House Spider Who Was Not To Be Squished.

Around the next month, mosquito season was, as usual, out of hand. There's still-water everywhere, so there's no way to avoid mosquitoes. There was one (or maybe it really was a bunch of them) that covered me in welts while I worked on my priceless art, and even while I frigging slept. This effing mosquito persecuted me.

So one night I said to Gareth, "Hey, I let you live and you have a nice castle up there. Why don't you earn your keep and get that mosquito?"

Damned if the very next night, Gareth wasn't wrapping up a buzzing, struggling mosquito in his shining little web.

"Oh, what a great spider!" I told him.

Here's the part that's hard to believe, but I swear it's true: I stopped getting bitten by mosquitoes directly after that. No, people, I mean like, forever. To this day? Mosquitoes don't bother with me. Now, yes, I have since then changed my diet or whatever, but I don't know. I live on a swamp. Mosquitoes are still everywhere, yet if I get one mosquito bite per summer, I'm surprised.

Anyway, going back to 1989.

So that was how it went that summer, for almost two months. You already know how it ends, though.

It was August, an evening, and my Dad was at work, Mom and I watching something on TV though I can't remember what. I looked up to the skylight to see what Gareth was doing, and he wasn't there. My Mom followed my glance, I guess. We looked at each other, looked down at the table, and saw Gareth curled up on the glass.

It's probably ridiculous that we were both trying not to cry. I got a tissue, picked up his little spider body, and realized I didn't want to throw him away.

"See if you can find a little jewelry box or something," my Mom told me.

So that was what I did. I found a plastic jewel box, the kind that fake engagement rings came in. I put the tissue with Gareth in it, and snapped it shut.

I remember my exact words to my Mom: "I'm so bummed that my little spider is gone."

Sounding surprised, she said that she was, too.

I remember we both figured that Dad would think we were being so silly, when he came home. But he was legitimately crestfallen, too, and he asked, "You didn't throw him away, did you?"

We showed him the little box we'd put Gareth in. He suggested maybe gluing it shut, so that air wouldn't get into it. He got me some glue. (Because that's what Dad did: he glued things. He had every kind of glue on the creation, for every broken thing there was.)

So I glued the case shut and then I wrapped it in scotch tape, too, which gave it a weird, muted crystal sort of look. Then I found a plastic spider ring that I'd had since I was a kid, and I broke the spider off the top and glued it to the case. I found little lace bow that had been on a valentines candy box (I kept all of those, too,) and glued it onto the plastic spider's front legs.



I said you know the end of the story and you probably do, because you've all seen Charlotte's Web. :)

It was about a week later that I looked up there and saw all the wee, teeny spiderlets flying down on their invisible webs. So, Gareth was actually a Garetha, I guess. And, of course, one of them stayed, rebuilt the web, and continued to catch bugs. This cycle went on for months.

Since then, I've never purposely harmed a spider. Even when cleaning the house, I clean around them. I never sweep them up and I never ask them to move out of their webs. Even the big, fast ones have a free pass here. Wolf spiders are welcome. Spinners, grass spiders, orb weavers, daddy longlegs, plain old house spiders of all shapes and sizes. If they are huge and scuttling around, looking likely to fall on me or something, I put them outside. Unless it's too cold, then I put them into the shed. But mostly, they're just allowed to walk around unmolested. There's a funnel-weaver in my bedroom right now, behind the curio set. He's about two inches long, chilling in his little funnel web, probably saving me a lot of grief by catching bugs before they can get to my bed.

We still have the same deal that we made 22 years ago, spiders and I: don't hurt me, I won't hurt you. Don't come crawling into my bed, I won't come trampling into your web.

The bigger, quicker moving ones still give me that instinctual "DON'T WALK ON ME!" shudder, but I have no problem handling small house spiders if I need to move them from one place to another. Once, when I had long nails, a teeny spider stayed on my hand long enough that he was able to build a web under my super long nail.

People who are new to my house are warned not to kill my spiders. I'm sorry if it freaks you out, I tell new guests, but spiders are welcome here and are not to be harmed.

We are cool, spiders and I, so I get a little defensive when people talk about squishing them. I react to it the same way I would if they told me they had killed a bird, or a mouse or something. So if you kill a spider, don't tell me about it! I don't want to know.

These days I don't like swatting things in general, and when I do kill things (wasps, invading ants,) it's with regret. (The only thing I gleefully end are ticks. They are ruinous and carry diseases that have cost me thousands of dollars, and cost the health of too many people I know.)

That's my spider story. And soon enough, I'll be making a video on HitRECord called Itsy Bitsy Spider, which will basically be a video of all my various little house spiders, and the cute and funny ways that they act.

So here's to you, Gareth the spider, 22 years dead, little arachnid body long since disintegrated into molecules in a glued-shut plastic jewel box.

You'd never think that a bug could make such a profound change, right? But I always think that it's the little things that stick with you the most.

Comments

[neomeruru.livejournal.com]

This was such a good story. I remember seeing my own Gareth spider in our garage once, and immediately feeling a sort of kinship with it -- it was huge, and sory of... majestic, in a way... anyway, I'm sure I don't have to explain to you. Anyway, I called my mom over to look at it because it was amazing, and she said 'huh' and stomped on it. I was heartbroken. I actually cried. I still regret that. :(