Things to do

What’s on TV?

British agents have foiled a terrorist plot, possibly linked to Al Qaeda, to blow up 10 airliners on their routes from London to the United States.

Maybe we should go to a movie instead.

“World Trade Center.”

Well, we can read a book. What are the two top sellers at Amazon?

“The Looming Towers,” about how Sept. 11 happened, and “Fiasco,” about how the Bush administration got us into the Iraq war.

Maybe I’ll just read the newspaper. What are the headlines?

World news: Iraq, Lebanon, BP negligence in oil pipeline shutdown. Local news: investigation shows San Diego city government behaved like Enron in pension scandal.

How about just going for a drive in the mountains?

Gasoline is $60 a tank.

Well, what do you want to do?

There’s a lot to do. Look at that mockingbird, chasing a hawk. Guarding its nest, I guess. Interesting, how the little bird always – and it really does appear to be 100 percent of the time – chases the big bird. I have seen a hummingbird dive-bombing a crow. What is that all about? Lots of mourning doves sitting on the phone lines lately. Must be a particularly time of year for them. They sit in pairs, and it looks like they may be courting. But then one from one pair runs off one from another pair, and then the one left behind takes off, and the second pair hangs around for 15 seconds, then one of them takes off. If they are courting, it doesn’t look as loving as the doves you see on the Hallmark cards.

The spiders are out in force. Orange ones, some small, some larger. They start their webs at dusk, dropping down from an eave and finding an anchor down below somewhere – a stalk, a piece of firewood, the corner of the glider - and shuttle back up for the next leg, a couple more anchors, and then the wide net. You always hope to see the webs after overnight weather has left them appliquéd with dew.

Seeing them at all is the real need. We have to be careful, walking down to the street to get the papers, that we don’t walk into a web, have it draped over our heads, and wonder if the spider is down our collar. The webs are easy enough to see, and I snag loose the anchor on one side, and let the spider scoot off to the other side, into the bush. I don’t like spiders, but I hate to kill them, after all their work, and their obvious faith in the results. It may be the only violence in the world over which I have any control. Of course if one gets down my collar, it’s every creature for himself.

It feels better to collaborate. Yesterday I almost literally sat down into a web anchored to the glider. I saw it just in time. The spider had caught something, very low down in the web, and already had it packaged, to some extent. If I had sat down, the package, and the spider, would have been right by my ear. Instead, I pulled the glider anchor loose, and the spider rushed up the web to the eave. I sat on the opposite end from the web and drank coffee. A few minutes later I looked at the web, now dangling loosely, again. The spider had come back down, tied onto the package, and was hauling it back up, to the eave. Did he know I wasn’t going to hurt him, when he decided to come back down? I hardly think so, but I felt good about it anyway.