By Jeff Mullin, commentary
Editor’s note: This column was first published June 11, 2003.
These days, when I hear a certain sound, I know violence is about to ensue.
It’s a distinctive sound, one that is hard to miss.
“Ooooooooooooh.”
That’s the sound.
It is the harbinger of death around my house.
The “oooooooooooooh,” the duration and volume of which vary from incident to incident, normally is followed by the word “spider,” which may or may not be preceded by some sort of description of the size, ugliness or relative ferocity of the aforementioned intruder.
Yes, I live with an arachnophobe.
When a spider invades our house, one of two things will happen — she will kill it or I will kill it. There is no negotiation, no amnesty, no clemency.
True, the majority of spiders are harmless creatures. They are beneficial, in fact, to the ecosystem as a whole. They help keep the insect population in check, for one thing.
Spiders have gotten a bad rap, thanks to the media. Take the movie “Arachnophobia,” for instance. And what about “Eight-Legged Freaks?” Going back a bit farther, there were films such as “Kingdom of the Spiders,” a 1977 sci-fi stinker starring William Shatner.
Going back even farther, spiders have been celebrated, and vilified, in rhyme. In the 16th century there was an entomologist named Dr. Thomas Muffet. He would use his daughter, Patience, as a guinea pig in his experiments with spiders. He would have all the different types of spiders in England bite her to see if she had any reaction. Fortunately for Patience, there are no poisonous spiders in England.
Patience’s patience paid off as she was later immortalized in the verse, “Little Miss Muffet, sat on a tuffet, eating her curds and whey, along came a spider, who sat down beside her, and frightened Miss Muffet away.”
In my house, Miss Muffet would have: (A) Beaten the spider to death with her shoe, a newspaper, a magazine or anything else that wasn’t nailed down, or (B) yelled for her husband to do it.
“Ooooooooooooh, a spider.” These words are normally followed by frantic seconds of carnage, which end with the remains of a spider being spread over a wide area, if, that is, there is enough of the spider left to identify. She doesn’t kill spiders so much as she obliterates them.
Spiders, it seems, never crawl out of their hiding places when I am up and active and ready for a little mortal combat. No, they wait until I am settled all warm and snug in my easy chair, with a ball game on the TV and as I’m easing down the slippery slope into sleep.
“Ooooooooooooh, a spider. A real big one.” Huh, what? Where? So I wipe the drool from the corner of my mouth and approach the area where the beast was last sighted. She is standing, pointing in the area of the couch. There it is, just scooting out of sight.
Darn, it is rather big. So I fetch a flashlight and a fly swatter, no rolled up newspaper or magazine for this baby. It has crawled completely under the couch and is up against the wall. So I move the couch and cautiously approach the suspect’s last known location. It’s gone. Back on my hands and knees with the flashlight, probing under the couch. There it is. But I can’t reach it. It’s getting away?
So I’m down on my belly and stretching out the fly swatter. It’s impossible to get much leverage in this ridiculous position, but I swat at the beast nonetheless. It moves. I swat again. It moves again. I swat again. After a time I realize the spider is no longer moving horizontally, only vertically. It is bouncing off the carpet every time I swat at it.
The beast was vanquished. Its body was folded up in a bit of facial tissue and discarded in the trash. She gave me a kiss and said I was her hero.
A hero. For smashing a small, helpless creature. Hey, I’ll take it.
“Ooooooooooohh.”
Excuse me, I hear a damsel in distress.
Mullin is senior writer of the News & Eagle.
