Mature Life Features

. . . to make plans to make your money last

are on tap for 2 p.m. Thursday in the 2nd floor theater.

Then it’s on to Thirsty Thursday’s happy hour

beginning at 3 p.m. in the bistro

before tottering by Lou Malnati’s pizza-tasting table

in the dining room at 5 o’clock.

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Some Pets Not for the Nervous

We’ve all read about or seen on TV some out-of-the-norm animals us humans claim as pets – reptiles, raptors, farmyard critters, jungle denizens, insects, you name ‘em. Some folks claim they’re “comfort” beasts and take them on vacations, airlines flights and trips to the supermarket. If this keeps up, I’m thinking of getting myself a comfort crocodile.

We have had a diverse set of animals over the years.  My sister killed one of them. It wasn’t my pet. I’m not comfortable enough to turn my back on spiders. This was a spider – a black widow. A couple of my kids spotted it under a stairwell and argued about its identity. To stop the arguing, my wife got a jar and went and captured it. Sure enough, it was a full-blooded black widow, the first poisonous creature we could call our own.

The kids popped a popsicle stick into the jar to give it something to crawl on and tossed in live flies, dead moths, tidbits of meat and even some hard-boiled yolk. It prospered somehow and even took the time to produce a couple of wisps of a web between the stick and sides of the jar.

My sister came to visit on a weekend and, when the kids showed her our latest pet, her reaction was natural. She went screaming back out the front door and said she wasn’t returning “until that thing is flushed down the toilet.”

She finally was talked back to earth when the boys assured her the beast was contained tightly in a well-screwed-down Mason jar and tucked high on a window sill where she could watch it to make sure it didn’t get close to her. Curiosity overcame her cowardice the next day as she began asking questions about the care and feeding of a black widow spider. One of the boys swatted a fly and joined his brother as they gave her a short course on the housing and handling of their pet.

They unscrewed the top of the jar and were about to dump in the dead fly when she got nervous and knocked the glass out of their hands. It smashed into pieces when it hit the floor and she was shrieking and scampering and scooted out of the area. The two boys got a broom and began to police the area carefully. But it was too late. In her jumping and jostling, my sister had stepped on the critter and it was ground into the linoleum.

She never apologized for the death nor did she offer to get the kids another pet spider.

It’s a good thing she wasn’t around when we had a pet caterpillar. It was rusty brown in the middle and black at both ends. We had trouble figuring out which end was its head. It spent its days in an empty fishbowl out on the back porch and we fed it lettuce. Then one day it was gone.

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