I’ve borrowed the (real)white transport van of my (former) convention services company. I’ve driven it home and am trying to wedge it between the two family cars already parked in our two-car garage. It won’t fit into the four-foot gap; in trying to avoid hitting our (real) white sedan I almost scrape the right side of our (real) new burgundy minivan. Finally I give up and get out of the van, leaving its rear end sticking out of the garage. (I have to turn it in tomorrow–Tuesday– because it’s Luke’s next-to-last day of school. After I drive it to work Peter will have to pick me up at the office. I could walk home, but it would take a long time; it’s pretty far.)
Passing through the garage on my way into the house I notice a strand of spider web stretched across the left front side of the sedan. Two black spiders, each an inch and a half wide, are perched on it. More webbing has been spun across the car’s grille; it gets thicker as it spreads. Several more of the black spiders are here.
Now I’m inside the house, trying to clear away the webs that are suspended between the couch and the kitchen counter. The spiders do not budge during this process, but I know that if I just throw them into the kitchen trash along with the webbing that they’ll crawl out and start all over again.
Suddenly a man is helping me. We wind the webs on white cardboard shirt inserts. After a while he says, “I think you’d better use some spray.” He’s right; there are far too many webs and spiders for us to make much headway by hand. I get a can of bug spray and start on the kitchen. I tell the man, “This is where it started,” but as we work backwards toward the door out to the garage I think that this was where I remember seeing the webs for the first time. I say, “No, wait, it was HERE that they started.” This happens again when we enter the garage, and yet again when we get to the sedan.
A young woman (a DJ?) reclines backwards on the hood of the car, her feet braced on the cement floor. She’s wearing a T-shirt and shorts. The man tells her she’d better move off the hood or the spiders will climb onto her. She stands up, but then in no time is back to leaning on the car. I warn her this time and she straightens again, but again she immediately lies back across the hood. I wonder why she’s doing this.
In the background as we work, Steely Dan’s “My Old School” plays on the car radio.
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