Close encounters with the unknown

“Yeah, I have one just like it in my living room.” Maybe not my living room, but in my yard. That Richard Dreyfuss line from Close Encounters of the Third Kind came to mind when I read about the nasty little bit of California that made its way accidentally to Connecticut, where a woman found a black widow spider in a bunch of grapes. She rushed it to a poison control center, and it made the national news.

I’m glad she didn’t get bitten, and that she had an interest in bugs, so she recognized it. (An adult female black widow spider is shiny black, with a bulbous body and usually a red hourglass marking on its belly.) But if someone in Southern California finds a black widow spider, it doesn’t make the news. It certainly raises a personal alarm, and we get quite a bit more upset when they come indoors. But they’re all over the place, which is why I wear protective gloves when I work outdoors. They usually stay outside and don’t like to be around people — someone picking grapes must’ve caught that one sleeping. Here it would be killed and become a close-call story to tell one’s friends, otherwise unremarkable. A black widow in the national news? To me that sounds like a slow news day.

Then again, if snow covers the ground here, even in winter, at anywhere within 800 feet of sea level, it definitely makes the news. The last time that happened where I live was in 1967. When the ground turns white around here it’s more likely the result of a hail storm. And call me paranoid, but I tend to check every bunch of bananas I bring home, for exotic South American spiders.

I guess it’s just what you’re used to, and it’s always exciting to find something you’re not used to — better if it doesn’t do you any harm. That’s one reason I love to read. A primary appeal of books, for me, is those vicarious close encounters with the unknown. I prefer my more dangerous close encounters to come in the form of fiction — like a good mystery novel.