~ ~ ~
The other day -- a sunny one, stirred by the merest of
breezes -- a friend and I sat on a low wall conversing (much like Pooh and Piglet in similar
circumstances), in a shady spot of the University of Maryland campus, where I
now work part-time, in addition to my regular job. He remarked, à propos of nothing (for there was really
nothing much to be à-propos of, save the drifting clouds and the dreaming
birds, neither of which had anywhere they had to be, in any sort of haste or
hurry) that his wife has an absolute horror of snakes. Simply cannot abide ‘em.
Now, snakes (I mused aloud), I can take them or leave them,
just as you please; but one
creature that many people shrink from, but which I positively enjoy, is spiders. These have held an especial fascination ever since I read a detailed account of
their constructional capacities (webs of various sorts and shapes, according to
species, but other contraptions as well) in a book by the science writer
Richard Dawkins. Whenever I spy a
spider, I seem to behold a busy little engineer, and am always careful not to
disturb his handiwork (or leg-i-work), even to the extent of, if needs be,
ducking-under to go out to the
back deck, or refraining from emptying the leaf-barrel, whenever its brim has
been spanned with a weft of his recent weaving.
(There is always something new and wondrous in the world of
spiders. Last week they reported a
new kind of locomotion in one desert species: It can do a kind of forward back-flip (if that is the term I
want) as it scurries along, whether to relieve its little eight feet from the
burning sands, or from sheer high spirits, was unclear. He can also do a string of them in
succession, so that he rolls along like a tumbleweed.)
Yet afterwards, as I drove home, it occurred to me that my
fondness for God’s wee octopods goes
back much farther, earlier than Dawkins or even than learning to read: back to Oak Ridge, by our little white
house with its proper white downspout, one sunny day still glistening with a
late rain, as you taught me a little rhyme, on a bouncy wee tune, that lives in
memory yet (though that was long ago, the day you taught it to me, Truman
probably still in office if I reckon correctly, and any number of things not
yet invented), and which has been handed down through mothers and grandmothers
and great-great-grandmothers through immemorial time, almost back to the first
day of Creation. It goes (in
the version you taught me, which is still my favorite; other variants exist):
Oh
the inky-dinky spider ♪ went up the water
spout.
Down
came the rain, ♫ and washed the spider
out.
Out
came the sun, ♪ and dried up all the
rain,
and
the inky-dinky spider ♫ went up the spout
again.
You taught me the hand-gestures that go with it: downrippling fingers to figure the
raindrops sliding down the spout, broadspreading arms to evoke the return of
the smiling sun: but best of all,
an intricate, digital concatenation, thumb to finger and finger to thumb (with
an asymmetry easier to show than to describe in words), then pivoting on the
one link, swiveling upwards a rung, now this way now that (it’s quite difficult
even to imagine, unless you are watching yourself do it), in a way that is
quite counter-intuitive until you get the hang of it: all of which represents, or is meant to suggest, the patient
slow small steps of our diminutive eight-legged friend, Mister Spider -- whose
actual motions, indeed, must exceed in complexity anything or brains can
picture or fingers depict -- as he climbs the spout, and then, washed-down, re-climbs it, nothing daunted, as many
times as it takes. This was, in
fact, the most complicated physical movement I had ever learned as of that
date, rivaling that of tying one’s shoe (a task I had not yet mastered), and
scarcely to be exceeded in after-years, until the dos-ee-dos and allemand-left
of square-dancing.
~
Well, Mother, such is the gift you gave me that day, so long
ago; and which, in the absence of
grandchildren of my own, I from
time to time pass on to such of the wondering toddlers of
our cul-de-sac as care to gather
round and learn the old lore.
For there will ever and anew be fresh children, and that inky, dinky
spider will never cease climbing
his spout.
