Itsy Bitsy Spider

A few weeks ago I was on the metrolink on my way to a destination I shall not here disclose when a woman entered the train at the Skinker station and took a seat in front of me. She seemed to have known the man who was sitting next to her because she immediately began speaking to him, and he to her, even though she was carrying a book, and even though every other time I've seen her on the train she has been intently focused on the book she was reading during that particular week. This woman is a serial reader. She reads a different book every week. Perhaps she may read a different book every day, but since I only take the train to this particular destination once per week, I only see the different book every week. There is no reason to believe she is not changing books every 15 minutes, even. But a weekly change is most realistic to someone like me, who took over a year to read Rushdie's Midnight's Children, which I then claimed as my favorite book, but this has nothing to do with my point.

The woman sat in front of me. She spoke to the man. They were engrossed in their conversation. But as I looked ahead, I noticed something strange on this woman's back. There was a little spider sitting quietly just around the area of her shoulder blades. Now I am terribly afraid of spiders, and I was wont to scream like a little bitch and run away crying, however I was in public, and if being a brown bearded man on a train dangerously close to the anniversary of September 11 wasn't a bad enough thing, I decided that perhaps I should not take the screaming route. So I looked at the spider and it had not budged. However, it had the potential of moving at a moment's notice, and if it decided to, it could go anywhere. Anyway, the spider was clearly a boy spider, so I am going to refer to "it" as "he/him" from now on and occasionally I will call him by his given name, Spidey. So Spidey was about one quarter of an inch from one end to the next, and he looked very gross.

As I sat there, with my eyes fixed on him, his eight eyes perhaps fixed on me and everyone else around him, I contemplated what I should do. Should I reach over and squish him? First of all, that would have been gross. He would squish all over my hands, and I would have spider guts all over me. Secondly, my squishing him would require me to make contact with a complete strange middle aged woman on a train. It could even be misinterpreted as a caress. She may be offended, but even worse... no, much worse, she might enjoy it and try to get some more. So then I wondered, maybe I should tap her on her shoulder, sufficiently far away from Spidey, and say, "excuse me ma'am, but you have a spider on your shoulder blade." This, however, I realized could then result in a panic on the part of the woman, who, in her panic, could end up throwing her dirty, creepy, crawly, eight eyed monster onto ME.

So after weighing my options, I decided that the spider was, in many ways, a reflection of myself. Here I was taking a trip on a piece of public transportation that I was not necessarily fond of due to the tendency for me to encounter unpleasant things during my journey. Likewise, Spidey was trying to get to his destination also, and to do so, he needed to make use of his own form of public transport: a middle aged woman, and would encounter anti-spider terrorism in the form of large human beings trying to squish him for simply choosing to live his life and not be ruled by fear (of being squished). This was still worth it to him because he has a wife and 10,000 children waiting for him on the other end of his journey. After thinking of it this way, I sat contentedly in my seat and said/did absolutely nothing.

And I felt good about myself.