Trigger Warning

My Daddo was petrified of snakes. A traumatic childhood canoe mishap rendered him and his sister and his mother all terribly snake-averse.

In later years, he referred to them as "serpents" in a mostly ineffectual effort to keep from getting the willies* when talking about them.

Not wanting to suffer the same fate, I once took hold of a squirmy mass of frigid reptiles as they emerged from their winter dormancy. I figured if I could grasp multiple snakes and carry them around for a bit, I would never have that fear.

​So I conveyed my legless cargo –– at full arm's stretch over my head like the trophy I imagined it was –– to Mumsie as she knelt gardening and said, "Look! Snakes!"

Mumsie was seriously afraid of spiders but pretty much loved any other living creature in the world. She said, "Oh, for pity's sake. Put them down before they warm up and start biting you."

Lo these decades later, the vaccination still works. A little corn-snake lurking among some line doesn't bother me one bit.

​I wonder if he imagined he was invisible. He didn't have much of a grip on how complementary colors work on the color wheel. It's a like scene from a Michael Bay film. 

*Ooh, yeah, that Flickr site: so there's someone who re-creates Gary Larson's Far Side cartoons using Legos.
I may have reached the end of the interwebs.