Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man Saves a Day

When I was 9 or 10, Dad took me from our little Nebraska town to see a major-league baseball game in Kansas City. The Red Sox were playing, and at some point during the trip we wound up in a sporting goods store where, toward the back, the great Ted Williams was talking about fishing.

We approached, and the future Hall of Famer signed a baseball for me. I still have the ball, but what I remember most about the moment is that, while signing the ball and handing it back, Williams kept talking to the clerk about fishing and never so much as acknowledged me.

No, the family didn’t sign me up for therapy, but maybe it explains why I love the story that Ronnda Zezula Griffith wants me to tell.

It happened last month when she and her family added a day to their vacation to Mexico, specifically to go to Universal Studios in Hollywood in the hope of seeing Spider-Man.

More specifically, so 4-year-old Deklen could see him.

Maybe, like me, you’ve forgotten what it’s like to be 4 and in awe of superheroes. “He’s been nuts about Spider-Man since he was 2 years old,” Griffith says of her son. “He’s got Spider-Man video games, the DVDs, he’s got the costume mask, the shoes, the shirt. He’s a groupie.”

Because she’d e-mailed earlier, I know where the story is going, but I love hearing a mom’s enjoyment in telling what happened to her son.

“The first thing we see is Spider-Man on an ATV and right in front of him is Green Goblin, which is his nemesis,” Griffith says. “Dek’s eyes got huge and he wanted his dad to hold him. He didn’t want to be anywhere near Gobbie. He kept looking back and forth, and we could tell his thought process was, ‘Why aren’t they fighting?’ ”

Deklen wouldn’t go near Spider-Man with Gobbie near, so the moment was lost. The family spent much of the rest of the day puttering around the theme park, trying to find out if Spider-Man could be found alone. They saw him a second time, but Dek again wasn’t prepared to approach his hero.

In midafternoon, they had a third sighting. The family was in a gift shop when Griffith saw Spidey and overheard him talking to someone about comic books. “We kept trying to get Dek to go up and talk to him,” she says. “His eyes got huge -- obviously he wanted to -- but he’s kind of a shy kid. He doesn’t warm up right away, let alone to his hero. It had to be overwhelming for him.”

So, Mom took charge. She went over to Spider-Man and laid things out for him, not knowing what kind of mood he was in that day. Her experience on vacation has been that, lots of times, adults aren’t too thrilled with the chance to deal with kids.

Instead, Spider-Man told her he’d been a shy kid himself. He walked over to Deklen, got down in a crouch to meet him eye-to-eye and said, “Hi, Deklen, I’m Spider-Man. I’ve been waiting all my life to meet you.”

Griffith, talking to me by phone from her home in Oregon, says she’s teary-eyed just reliving the moment. “Everyone in the shop just teared up,” she says. “If you could have seen the expression on my son’s face. He totally melted. He got a gigantic grin on his face, his eyes got big and that was it. They were buddies.”

She insists they talked for at least 10 minutes, even after I express doubt that Spidey would have stayed that long. A group of people gathered around, she says, but Spider-Man kept his focus on Deklen. Then, he told Deklen he was needed elsewhere.

“When he bounded off,” Griffith says, “He did it in character. He said someone needed him and that he had to run.”

Convinced Spidey was off to save someone, Deklen didn’t mind a bit.

It’s been a few weeks now, but Griffith says Deklen still wears his Spider-Man costume every night. “It’s the one he got in that shop.”

I ask why she wanted the story told. Partly, she says, it was to use the newspaper to get the word to Universal that Spider-Man was a true hero that day. Her post-vacation efforts to contact a live human being at the park to thank them were frustrating, she says.

And, of course, she wants to thank Spider-Man. I contacted Universal, and a spokesman said he’d definitely get the word to Spidey but that he couldn’t track him down for an interview.

No problem. I couldn’t have told him the way Griffith would tell him.

“He needs to know that things like that have an impact,” she says. “I’d want to know if I made that big a difference to someone.”

And there was one other thing, an angle we don’t often see in the newspaper. Or in real life.

Even our good times, Griffith says, seem to come with subtle layers of stress. A wedding, for example, is joyful, but somewhere in the back of your mind you’re thinking about the cost.

But to be 4 and, out of nowhere, your superhero says he’s waited his whole life to meet you?

“It struck us,” Griffith says, “that so few of us get that kind of pure thrill.”

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.