From Gene’s Notebook
…going downhill - letting the bike glide - into Louisiana, Missouri, yelling for joy, or effect, and scaring a man mowing his lush lawn on a hillside just above the river flats of Louisiana, Missouri, and I love to say those mixed-heritage American words, Louisiana, Missouri ….
…and then I yell at dogs and cats, and I water a tarantula’s hole, and it emerges and I club it to death with the hose nozzle, and I have raised my voice to students ….
…ok, you reflecting-on-the-decades piece of humanity, if you value those hills and river flats, and are upset with the verbal and physical violence, even ant killing, act ….
Eugene “Gene” Novogrodsky
September 28, 2008
1 response so far ↓
1 Jack king // Sep 30, 2008 at 10:34 am
Gene, I thoroughly enjoyed your first paragraph — great imagery, stimulating and joyful.
And when it comes to killing ants, the thought hardly bothers me at all, especially those pesky imported fire ants, which for no apparent reason, seem to have disappeared around my place with no help from me about four or five years ago. Nature works in mysterious ways.
But when it comes to tarantulas, it really disgusts and angers me to see somebody kill one.
The sight of a tarantula brings back fond memories of my year in Del Rio, Texas. I was in the fourth grade, and the big hairy critters were as common as jackrabbits. Cars would often swerve to keep from running over one on a street or highway. I can’t remember anyone ever getting bitten by one. They weren’t like the puny brown one in your picture, but as big as a man’s hand. Most of them were solid black, but occasionally we would enconter a brown one. We used to pick them up and chase the girls with them, and eventually they overcame their fear and disgust and began to pick them up themselves. On one occasion one of my friends stood still with a couple of tarantulas crawling up and down his arms and the rest of us went about collecting more tarantulas to put on him and when he had about a dozen on his body, including one on his face, somebody came out with an old box camera and took several pictures of this artfully arranged living composition.
Sadly, when I drove through Del Rio a couple of years ago, I didn’t see a single tarantula on the highway, on the streets, or anywhere else. And the beautiful San Felipe Creek where I learned to swim at the age of ten, while still sparkling clear as it enters the city, is dirty and opaque as it exits toward the Rio Grande.
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