The spider that would not give up (08/27/2008)

Arachnophobia warning: If you have a fear of spiders, read no further.

Wait until next week's column and try that one instead.

I've never been particularly bothered by the eight-legged things, though images of something as big as a tarantula give me the creeps.

Mostly, I've just thought of them as nature's way of reducing the population of irritating insects like flies and mosquitoes. I have a similar respect for bats, as long as they have the good sense to stay outside where they belong.

But sometimes even spiders can cross the line.

It was one morning last week, and I'd gone out to get the newspaper.

At our house, that usually means going almost all the way out to the curb to pick up The Journal-Gazette.

Only on Saturdays does it make it to our front door, and that's only because our CR carrier, Tom Dolecki, picks it up out of our lawn and delivers it properly.

It was still dark, a sign that summer is slipping away. And as I passed the corner of the house I felt a cobweb across my face, never a pleasant experience.

I waved my arms a bit and wiped at the gooey stuff but couldn't really see what I was doing.

There was still cobweb on me when I bent down to pick up the paper. I opened it up to check out the front page by the light of a lamppost in the front yard and was just beginning to focus on a headline about a murder case when something black appeared on the page.

I flailed wildly, not knowing at first what the heck had spooked me. By the time I realized it had been a spider, I figured I had tossed it into the next county.

Now there are spiders and there are spiders. The little ones can be the most dangerous, but there's something about the size and appearance of a garden spider that gets your attention. And this was a garden spider about the size of a catcher's mitt. Or at least it looked that way in the half-dark.

By the time I got back in the house, I had most of the cobweb removed. And when I put the morning paper on the kitchen table there was no evidence that the spider had sneaked into the sports section.

So when I sat down at the computer to check e-mail, I figured I was spider-free.

No such luck.

A minute or two later, I found the thing again. This time it was hanging from a piece of web and dangling from the sleeve of my bathrobe.

Time for more wild flailing of arms. But apparently this time I flailed too wildly.

The spider disappeared completely, though I knew that wasn't possible. It was somewhere, lurking, figuring out how to surprise me one more time.

Over coffee at breakfast I told my wife about the whole thing, though by that time the spider was about the size of an SUV.

She was amused but skeptical about the whole thing.

At least for a couple of days.

"I've found your spider," she told me. "But I can't reach it."

Apparently the thing had grown attached to me in more ways than one. Maybe it just enjoyed the sight of a grown man jumping around like his feet are on fire.

There it was, hanging from a bit of cobweb it had spun above my computer desk, dangling down where it would be directly over my head while I wrote, an eight-legged version of a Sword of Damocles.

Now, some folks might find that inspiring.

As for me, I was inspired to squish the thing once and for all and finally be done with it.

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