Tony Deyal, Contributor
LAST WEEK Wednesday my daughter Jasmine awoke, like Abou Ben Adhem, from a deep dream of peace and proceeded to tear the wrapping on her birthday gifts to pieces. She was all of seven years, starting as a gleam in my eye and then becoming a tiny speck on an ultra-sound image.
Even so, the doctor was able to predict with certainty that Jasmine would be much taller than me, as if that was difficult. As they said when I was growing up, I would probably need a ladder to pick pumpkins.
It is a wonder my name is Tony and not Peter, particularly when, defying reason, we both suffered the fate described in the second line of the rhyme. Perhaps my inability to utilise a pumpkin shell creatively might have been responsible for my being named after the patron saint of the lost instead of the saint after whom Spiderman was named.
It was that kind of day, contradictory like (word equivalent to Rumpole's "she who must be obeyed" removed on the grounds that it would get me into trouble and I might have to move to a pumpkin shell).
Jasmine had got this karaoke microphone that plugs into the television set so that she could read and sing along with Disney songs like "You got to kiss de girl" and "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocius." As soon as I connected it to the television set, the electricity in Belmopan went, an event that has been occurring with the regularity of a metamucilated matron. Me, when I was growing up we slept on fibre, we never ate it. I remember when the General Council of the ruling party in Trinidad, many years ago, wanted to support the Prime Minister's handling of a strike by workers in the electric company, the party's bigwigs got together and came up with a news release that started shockingly with, "The current crisis in the electricity company."
BLACK AND CRUSTY
We had to leave the karaoke and toast our bread on the gas stove. It came out like some of our politicians, black and crusty on the outside, but soft and pallid on the inside. Afro-Saxon toast, well-bread. Then, after putting on her school shoes, and heading to school in the car, Jasmine got bitten by a tarantula spider that had hidden in her shoe.
In retrospect, I joked that it was clear that spiders have no sense of smell and that is why her shoes are called "sneakers". In the actual situation, it was panic stations since the spider in question was what we call a tarantula, black, hairy, bulbous, and Jasmine was shouting, screaming, trembling and in agony in the back seat.
Fortunately it was not radioactive otherwise we might have ended up with a spider woman on our hands, an eventuality for which I am not presently prepared since I have no Web site and I am not like that other Peter, a nosy Parker.
I drove home like a bat out of the Boston Archdiocese, and made a run for the Benadryl, a cure-all for spider bites as well as wasp, bee, and jelly-fish stings. We eventually found the creature dead in the car but I would not attribute that to Jasmine's sneakers or her toe, although I am convinced that its nose had curled up in what seems to be distaste, or so I joked trying to get Jasmine to relax and forget the pain. It is hard to believe such a little creature could inflict such agony. I mean the spider, not any of my children. It was a mid-size compact with the power of an SUV (Spider Ugly and Venomous).
My friend Harry Phillipeaux, who had worked in Belize for some time, had warned me about the dangers that lurk here. "Why do you think men urinate not at the side of the road but in the middle along the white line?" he asked. It was not some kind of weird riddle like, "What do you call two spiders that have just got married?" Newly webs. Or what's the difference between a canary with one wing and a canary with two wings? A difference of a pinion.
THIRSTY SPIDER
However, he was serious. "You don't know what's in the bush at the side of the road," he said. "You have to be careful you don't wake up a snake or attract a thirsty spider." I suppose that is what led to the maxim that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, or why Johnny Cash sang, "Because you're mine, I walk the line." Saddam Hussein, it is said, perhaps because he was desert-bred, and loved the wide open spaces, was an avowed and bitter enemy of Bush.
It is rumoured that just before the fall of Baghdad, he killed his number one wife with three well-placed shots. Seems that as they decided to spend one last night of passion and pathos together, he had the shock of his life. She stripped and he saw Bush. "Oh Shi'ite," he ejaculated. Not a pleasant way to go whether by a Colt Cobra or any other member of the species. Maybe he was just delusionary and not revolutionary.
There is a story about a Belizean truck driver who stopped his truck at the side of the road and foregoing custom and common sense proceeded to hydrate the roadside vegetation instead of converting the dusty trail to mud. Unfortunately, he did not see the huge tarantula lurking exactly where his bird in the hand was adjacent to the bush.
He got bitten where it hurts and continued to hurt. He sent his loader to seek help. After walking some distance the loader found a telephone booth where he made a panic call to a doctor at the Heusner Hospital. The doctor's advice to the loader was that he should make an incision in the wound and suck the poison out.
The loader returned disconsolately to the scene of the accident and said sadly to his friend, writhing in pain on the ground. "Ah tark to de doctor." The poor driver seized on this straw of comfort and asked, "An wat he say?" After a brief pause the loader remarked very sorrowfully, "He say youh dead."
Tony Deyal was last seen asking why do black widow spiders kill their mates before mating? To stop the snoring before it starts.
