David Heiller
I’ll never forget
the day.
Jake, a friend of
our son’s, came to visit and with a certain gleam in his eye, dumped a bag full
of plastic dead flies on the kitchen floor.
I stared in
disbelief. I mean, my jaw dropped. We have approximately 1,493 REAL dead flies
on our bedroom window sill upstairs on any given morning, and Jake brings in a
pile of fake ones!?!
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| Noah and Jake with a wooden lizard; one of many in a play menagerie |
“Why dead plastic
flies?” you may ask. I puzzled over that for quite some time too. Until Jake
brought along his plastic tarantula.
Hold on. This is no
ordinary plastic tarantula. Not like the weak pretenders of my youth. Those
were brittle, cheap pieces of Japanese junk.
Jake’s tarantula is
supple and subtle. Delicate and deadly. Black, with a hint of orange around the
eyes, and white rings on the leg joints and the fangs. The kind of spider that
crawls toward sleeping women in late-night jungle movie moonlight. It looks
real. Like it could eat those plastic dead flies, and a few live ones, and a
few 36-year-old men thrown in for dessert.
You see, Jake’s
tarantula isn’t life-size. It’s more the size of Kent Hrbek’s baseball glove.
It also squeaks when
you step on it, which I have done a few times in the middle of the night, with
me making approximately the same sound as the spider.
Noah fell in love
with Jake’s tarantula as only a six-year-old kid can fall in love with a tarantula.
Star-crossed spiders. He would borrow it on every occasion. Jake would extort
great collateral for it. Huge piles of dinosaurs. A fleet of Tonka toys that
would shame some city maintenance crews. Anything for that tarantula.
So we shouldn’t have
been surprised. We should have prepared ourselves. Noah celebrated his seventh
birthday last Saturday with three friends, including Jake the Snake, and Jake
had that Dead Fly gleam in his eye as he handed Noah the package, and Noah
ripped it open and got that Dead Fly gleam in his eye and held up his very own
giant tarantula.
“Look, Noah, it’s
just like mine,” Jake said, reaching into a paper bag and pulling out his
famous tarantula. I recognized it right away. And sure enough, Jake had found a
first cousin. Noah’s had an orange back, red eyes, and a bit of green on the
back. The hairs on the torso were longer, softer. Otherwise they might have
come from the same batch of eggs.
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| Noah loved all manner of creatures, real and pretend, modern era and prehistoric. Here he is with a pterodactyl that Grandma Olson gave him for one of those birthdays. |
They also played
with other gifts, including a black snake, coiled and ready to strike, and a
set of 24 plastic bugs ranging from a Gigantic Ship Scorpion and Great Diving
Beetle to a Death’s Head Hawk Moth and a Sheep Tick. Yes, we now have a plastic tick in our house to go along with the 1,493 REAL
ticks that live in our front lawn.
It’s Jake’s fault.
Cindy called it “The
Creepy-Crawly-Slimey Birthday.” An understatement.
After the kids had
all returned to their homes, Noah discovered that Jake had forgotten his
tarantula. He showed both spiders to me Monday night, lying in his bed in the
moonlight. He pointed out their differences in a matter of fact voice. Like a
scientist. Then he looked at me and smiled. What did he see in my eyes?
Certainly not abject fear. No way.
I kissed Noah good
night and brought the two tarantulas downstairs, to study them. I set them on
my computer and watched them.
Just sat. And
studied. And watched. And waited.
Did one of them just
move?
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