The Apocryphal Penguin: Giant Spiders!

(Wikipedia defines the term apocrypha as a word “used with various meanings, including "hidden", "esoteric", "spurious", "of questionable authenticity", and "Christian texts that are not canonical". The story that follows is handed down in my family as history, with no one to actually verify its veracity. In the interest of full disclosure, this story is possibly apocryphal and I am making no claims that they are 100% accurate. If any of my siblings read this and make comments / corrections/ or have different memories, I will share them too.) And so now without further ado:

Spiders the size of basketballs

My grandmother was a great cook. If I only knew then, what I know now, I would have watched her prepare everything and learned how to do it right. She was from the old country, born near Naples, Italy and came to this country when she was in her early teens. In those days she did things the old school way – that is fresh food, prepared by hand, lovingly, and in mass quantities, like any good Italian household. She made a Sunday sauce to die for, fresh meats in a tomato sauce that cooked on top of the stove for hours. Ravioli was handmade on the kitchen table with a wooden window shade as a rolling pin, all cut by hand. I loved her veal parmigana and her Italian cookies were the best.

A staple of the Italian household was fresh fruits and vegetables. Her house in Bayside NY had a peach tree in the back yard. She also had several fig bushes around the yard which she hand fertilized with the fish guts her son and my dad caught. We always had cats hanging around our yard and the figs she grew were the size of baseballs. All of this leads me to the story of the pears and spiders.

Near our home there was a tiny municipal airport, the kind with itty bitty planes. Its biggest claim to fame was that this was where they parked the Goodyear Blimp whenever it was in town. On a road, past this airport there was a small grove of fruit trees, in an abandoned plot of land. No doubt, a small orchard of a long gone home owner or farmer. I don’t remember exactly but I think they were mostly pear trees, but there could have been others. One day our parents packed us up for a ride and after watching the planes land for a while, we took the road to the pear trees. Out of the trunk came a large bag and my dad walked thru some tall weeds to the tree and began picking ripe pears. All was going smoothly until my grandmother began shouting and pointing. Right near my dad was a giant spider.

As I remember, the spider was easily the size of a basketball. There are two problems with this. First, we do not have any spiders in NYC this size. Maybe these were mutant spiders created from the toxic dumping of chemicals in College Point sound. Perhaps it was the tree branches that gave it that appearance or maybe the adrenaline from the screaming, but it was that big and moving in for the kill. My dad came flying out of the tree, into the car and we pealed out of the roadside dirt headed back to home. Everything ended up all right and we got pear cookies that night.

This is filed under the Apocryphal heading because of the giant spider image. All the other parts of this story are generally personal memories that can be trusted.