I awoke one morning to find that a lone and unseen spider had sometime in the night visited me while I slept. He did not bite me or crawl across my face or skin. Nor did he lurk and hide awaiting the perfect moment to surprise me upon my waking. He only passed through my life for a single night, unseen and unobserved, but for a long silvery strand of web he left just across my tiny three-inch-wide cell window. It began somewhat near the top of the window and was stretched out and down at just the perfect angle for me to notice it.

I lay there looking up at the morning sunlight glinting off of the newest addition to my lonely, closed off world, and I became hypnotized by that single strand of glowing web. I could not help but lay there marveling at the beauty of the miniature rainbow traveling ever so slowly down the strand as the sun grew brighter and higher in the sky.

It was just then that I heard the guards calling, “Stand for count!” so I shook myself out of my hazy musing and stood up to begin yet another day of my life as a number on a piece of paper. I forgot all about the strand of web stretched out across my window.

A few days later I was sitting in the gloomy dark of my cell when I heard, “Standby for outside rec!” and I looked at the window to see if it was sunny and bright or dark and grey outside. Not that I was going outside or anything… I never go outside… But I noticed again the web. At first, I thought to myself I should knock it down. That’s what my Grandma always did. I can see her now in my mind’s eye when we lived with her.

I was just about seven years old, and she was standing on a kitchen chair with a broom sweeping at cobwebs in the corners of her old house. My Dad was laughing and joking that she better not knock too many of them down, that they might be the only thing still holding the house together! We were so poor back then and I know now that it was one of the times that my dad was home from prison.

It was also then that I asked my dad about cobwebs and what they were and how they were made and what made them and the inevitable hundreds of questions that a seven-year-old mind can think of. My dad answered every question he could and then directed me to Grandma’s little bookshelf, where there was a mostly complete second hand set of yard sale encyclopedias. I could read pretty good for a seven-year-old, so as far as I was concerned, my dad had just given me the whole world in the pages of those old dusty volumes. Even though my dad only got to go to school until the fifth grade before extreme poverty and a hard life put him on a different path, he has taught me more about life and the world around me than all the teachers any school could ever throw at me. The availability of the Parole, Probation and Work Release systems as alternatives to incarceration in Tennessee made such a big difference in me not having to grow up without my dad.

So, sitting there in my cell, I decided to just leave the cobweb be. I remembered how awed I was waking up to find it glimmering in the sunrise and somehow my little world didn’t feel quite so lonely anymore.

It has been about two and a half months now since my nocturnal visitor left his splendid gift for me. It’s not the tight shining silvery spear of light it used to be. It’s now dull and sags with the accumulation of dust and time. Just like the reflection in my cell mirror… Where once there was youth and vitality, now there is only a broken and sad old man staring back at me.

But all the same, what an awesome gift to have been given. Not just the satisfaction of being able to see something beautiful in something others would see as only unsightly or dirty, but also realizing that I have the wisdom and the self-control to not just react blindly and knock things down. Look at all of the insight and self-reflection I would have missed had I just sat up and cleared the web away like most of us have been conditioned and taught to do. Besides, I guess a great many of us go through life like cobwebs… We find ourselves in an out of the way place where we cling desperately to what we can for as long as we can. All the while hoping that no one will come along and knock us down.