Watch out for gators in the airport

            I'm a worrier. I worry about my family, my job and my friends. I worry about health care, the economy and the price of gas. I even worry about our dog.

            It doesn't take much to send me off into spasms of worry. Take for instance the latest you-won't-believe-this story – deadly spiders were found on a supermarket banana.

            Here's the tale:  A couple from London was forced to have their home fumigated after deadly spiders sprouted from a white spot on a banana the wife had just purchased. She thought it was a brown spot on the banana she was eating when she saw tiny spiders crawling on the banana's skin.

            Let's re-read that sentence – she was actually eating the banana when she saw the spiders. That means that these deadly Brazilian spiders – a species the Guinness World Records geniuses designated as the world's most venomous spider – was mere inches away from this woman's mouth.

            I immediately went in the kitchen and examined the bananas on the counter. Thank goodness they're only getting mushy, not breeding millions of killer spiders.

            In another news story, an alligator was found under an escalator at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport. Not the sweltering Miami airport, which would be totally believable, but in the frigid, 30-degree Chicago airport.

            In addition to terrorists and the long-term effects of having your body x-rayed, photographed and searched, now we have to worry about reptiles by the rental car desk.

            It's not like we worriers have been asleep at the wheel. Over the years, we've had plenty to worry about –watermelon seeds sprouting in our stomachs and a guy with a hook attacking us if we were in a parked car, making out with our boyfriend.

            So these new strange-but-true stories have to get in line behind the tried-and-true worrisome stories like Bigfoot which refuse to go away. The search for Bigfoot was popular when I was a kid and now three people in Oklahoma were arrested when out looking for the legendary Sasquatch.

            What's really incredible is that people think a hairy ape-like creature can stay undetected in the woods in these days and times. With my ordinary cell phone, I can access Google Earth and see my aunt's car parked in her driveway up in New York State. No way hulking "Harry-and-the-Hendersons" creatures are living in the woods without somebody finding them and convincing them to go on the Letterman Show.

            Although it's a fact that gigantic Asian carp – an invasive, destructive species of ravenous fish – have been found in the Great Lakes watershed, we now have to worry that the Asian carp will single handedly, well at least single fin-dedly, wipe out all the plankton and native fish in every lake in America.

            And let's not forget the real worries about infestations of the disgusting cockroach and the spread of vicious fire ants. Folks, a nuclear bomb could detonate south of the Mason Dixon line, and the only things left would be a gigantic mountain of fire ants alongside a nest of cockroaches crawling around on a three-foot deep growth of kudzu.

            Even with those disgusting things to fret over, I can honestly say there are some things I will never, ever worry about.

            Finding a chubacabra in my back yard.

            Crossing paths with the Abominable Snowman

            And spotting the Loch Ness monster in the Brazos River.

            I will, however, keep an eye out for those gators in the airport.

 This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.