Going Out

By Ed Wesely

Summer images

Crab spider. Recently I found a small spider hiding in the buds of a milkweed flower. It appeared to be pale yellow and held its front legs sideways.

It was, in fact, a member of the “crab spider” family, whose species hold their front legs as crabs do. They further emulate crabs by walking forward, backward and sideways.

I have a hunch that readers who tend gardens and/or observe wildflowers, especially milkweeds and goldenrods, have encountered the species I’m describing. Called a “flower spider,” it lies in wait for prey among innocent seeming blossoms and buds.

From the head to the tip of its abdomen my specimen measured about six millimeters in length, which is a little less than a quarter of an inch. When I determined the length of the front legs, I understood why the flower spider’s body seemed an appendage! The total span, from one side to the other, was about ¾ of an inch.

Unlike huge garden spiders and many house spiders, flower spiders apprehend their prey with the help of their long legs, but forsake the aid of webs and silken nets.

As a field guide explains, crab spiders that sit on flowers—such as my specimen—“apparently have a toxin potent to bees, flies and to other insects much larger than themselves.” They inject the toxin from fangs at the tips of their jaws, then—spider fashion—suck dry the hapless victims.

If the floral visitor is a honeybee, it’s a rerun—on a minute scale—of David challenging the giant Goliath and with similar results.

Pete Gray. In the summer of 1945, as the war with Japan neared a climax, we kids would take a bus to the DC line, and hop a cross-town streetcar to venerable Griffith Stadium. That year, because baseball lineups were filled with marginal players deferred from military service, our lowly Washington Senators were making an unaccustomed run at the American League pennant.

One day in late July, when the St. Louis Browns were playing at Griffith Stadium, we pooled our money and sat in the grandstand to watch Pete Gray, a one-armed outfielder, perform for the Browns. (He’d lost his right arm in a childhood accident in Nanticoke, PA).

I still recall how, in the fifth or sixth inning, Pete Gray drove a ball toward the right field wall that brought most of the stadium to its feet (and elicited groans when the ball was caught).

I believe he cleanly fielded several fly balls, too, but my memory’s dim about that.

I do know that we kids sensed it was a special day and that we were privileged to watch Pete Gray play baseball.

And I felt the same emotions arise last week, upon reading a headline in the Scranton Times that “One-armed baseball player Pete Gray dies.”

Like the great slugger Ted Williams, who also died last week, Pete Gray was a reserved man who seldom, if ever, acknowledged the plaudits of the crowds. But I still recall the crack of his bat on that distant afternoon and figuratively—and with much gratitude—rise in salute.