We have all read about the horror story from New Brunswick. Two young boys crushed by a massive python escaping from the apartment below and dropping on them from the ceiling vent.

As I grew up this was one of my worst nightmare concepts, a snake dropping on me in the middle of the night.   Wake up in the dark and you could vision a snake descending on you from the ceiling.   You saw this in James Bond movies so obviously a shared nightmare.

In the reality of daylight you say “how could this happen?”  You convince yourselves that this is as remote as an alien attack.  And  yet it happened for these boys.

Which has proven my life-long fear of snakes (a fear shared by Indiana Jones) .

And yet I grew up on the prairies where there were virtually no snakes beyond the occasional tiny garter snake.  I could appreciate my condition if I grew up in Australia or Florida.

For some reason this pathological fear of snakes that I have, was not passed on to my son.  James could pick up snakes when he was just a kid with no fear.

When James was about 8 years old we visited Regina and Blaine and I took him along as we played golf.  At one green we suddenly came across a massive 14 inch long snake on the green.  Blaine and I both climbed onto our golf carts (which was difficult because they were the little 2 wheel pull carts)  Meantime James just walked over and picked up the snake and dropped it at the side of the green.  At the time Blaine and I (as we crawled down from the top of our bags) said “well we could have done that but we were startled”

A few years later we were living in Markham and we had the occasional garter snake in the back yards.  Our neighbors would call and say, “can you send James over to get rid of a snake?”

These days I am very comfortable about seeing a garter snake in my garden.  They eat slugs and are good for the garden.   I can actually pick them up and move them to another part of the yard.

Then I hear the story of a Python dropping on kids in the middle of the night and the old fear comes back.  SHUDDER