I was an orderly child, everything had a place and stayed there or at least returned there. I took very good care of my things and had an enormous collection models, plastic horses, more than twenty barbie dolls (I kept begging for a GI Joe and my mother refused to buy it for me).

These days my apartment is a mess (you'll never guess what I found in one of the filing cabinets). I decided about seven years ago that i was tired of being tidy.

One day into my orderly world I came face to face with a tarantula. Snakes and lizards and rats never bothered me. I owned lots of them. However, the spider sitting on the Lost in Space model was a bit more than I wanted to deal with. Spiders gave me the creeps as a child and that one (no doubt magnified by my twelve year old imagination) looked like something out of a New World Cinema flick. I knocked it off the model with a paintbrush, only to have it apparently charge right at me. I didn't know then that spiders have a very limited vision and would not connect the hand wielding the paintbrush with the rest of me.

I fled through the house in search of a suitable weapon and saw the aerosol can of Pledge furniture polish. I grabbed up the can and returned to my room to vanquish the enemy. At that point the tarantula was sitting on the wall. I gave it a frantic squirt with the furniture polish. It moved. I squirted. It moved. I squirted it again. Finally, whipped up into a berserk fury, I expended the entire can of wax on the spider. Unfortunately, I now had an enormous vaguely spider shaped glob stuck to the walnut paneling of my wall.

Mama got home from work before I could think of what to do next. She shook the empty can of wax, and then she shook her head at me. The spider was duly removed from the wall, and I spent the next several hours scrubbing the wall and getting the globs of frantically aimed wax off. I suppose it could have been worse.