Proverbs 3, Verse 25
"Be not afraid of sudden terror, or of the darkness of the wicked when it will come."
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CHIPPED WISDOM:
It's funny what you remember. I remember nice things-- like my first kiss with the woman who would become my wife (precipitated by my undeniably romantic utterance: "Let's get this over with already") and I remember the surge and roar and growl my first car's engine made when I stomped hard down on the accelerator as an idiotic 16-year-old. I remember how it felt to be ensconced within my mother's arms as a boy when I was sad and I remember the exhilaration of riding the conveyer belt at my father's factory when I would go with him to work on Saturday mornings for his customary half day.
Wouldn't you know it, I also remember things that are not so nice?
You don't forget being bullied. My bullying was not so terrible, but it was rather consistent, and it lasted I think longer than is probably customary. I was bullied pretty heavily in college. My hallmates covered the doorknob to my room in a substance that was most likely ejaculate, which made shaking hands with my doorknob, um, unpleasant. They downloaded porn of dubious quality and taste onto my desktop computer when I wasn't there and my roommate let them in, and probably supervised the operation-- then they made pictures of obese women masturbating the subject matter of the screen-saver.
Cute.
One intoxicated gentleman decided to trim his pubic area while sitting on my bed. With my office scissors. While I was sitting in the chair next to him, daring me to do something about it. He was a lot bigger than me, and, you know, he had office scissors. With pubes stuck to them. I chose the Gandhi route.
Predictably, the bullying occurred, though not to this degree, in high school, and middle school, and elementary school-- where kids first establish a pecking order once they realize some kids are different than other kids and are, consequently, to be targeted. My bullying, however, started even earlier than that. My kindergarten teacher, after witnessing my perhaps excessively negative reaction to a picture of a tarantula in a storybook, yelled, "Oh-- don't be such a sissy!"
It hurt to hear it, and I crawled under a table in the corner for the better part of the day and cried, but really, it was good advice. If only I'd listened.
I'm not scared of tarantulas anymore-- though, to be fair, I can't say I've ever seen one in person... let's just say I'm not scared of pictures of tarantulas anymore-- though I do have a significant amount of fears. High on the list is a fear of dying in an airplane crash. Now, I haven't been on many airplanes, so the probability is very low but, every time I fly, I am about 90% certain that the flight is going to terminate in a twisted inferno necessitating consultation of my unfortunate dental records. How my wife ever got me on many, many planes to get me to Indonesia for our honeymoon without the aid of copious amounts of Ativan and ether is beyond me. I guess you do crazy things for love.
When I was eight years old, Pan Am Flight 103 fell from the sky and its remains, and the remains of its passengers and crew descended on the town of Lockerbie, Scotland. I had a youthful affection for news anchors because they wore three piece suits and so I watched the news all the time as a kid, and I was mesmerized by the images of the broken plane, lying inert and in tatters, as helpless and bewildered local policemen stood impotently around the scene. Nothing to do. No one to help.
Nothing.
I watched endless footage of the bodies set alongside one another, in endless rows, in a makeshift morgue, covered in shrouds. They reminded me of candies in a box, just all lined up, identical looking in their wrappers. I watched film of hearses coming to the morgue to take this body or that to this morgue or that. If I wasn't watching that, I was watching reruns of "Monty Python's Flying Circus"-- so I'm not really sure which one is healthier.
One day, speaking of healthy, I assembled my family, and a friend of my 11-year-old sister who had the misfortune to visit our house that day, in the living room. I brought in our Casio electronic keyboard. I put a toy hearse (what? Didn't you have one of those growing up?) on the glass table in the middle of the room. I lined a bunch of Playmobil action figures (supine) onto the table and methodically covered each one in a white Kleenex. I played a modified version of Chopin's Funeral March on the keyboard and then loaded a Playmobil figure into the back of the toy hearse, drove it to the opposite end of the table, unloaded the action figure, and repeated until all of the Playmobil men and women victims were successfully deposited. I wish I could describe for you the facial expressions of my family members, and my sister's friend, but I never looked up once. When I was done, I wordlessly picked up my gear and walked out of the room. Maybe I knew what I was doing was wrong.
"You were trying to develop mastery over your fear," my wife said to me recently. I'm not sure that's true, and, if it is, I don't think it worked. Yeah, I've flown to Pittsburgh, North Carolina, Australia, Indonesia, and Ireland, but I've been an absolute wreck each time. Not only that, recently, when we had some free time to ourselves and it was my turn to pick the evening's televisual feast for the evening, what did I choose?
"Air Disasters" on the Smithsonian Channel. Subject matter: a 1978 mid-air collision between a passenger jet and a Cessna over a crowded section of San Diego, killing 144 people. I mean, what was I supposed to do? "Bob's Burgers" was a re-run.
Fear doesn't stop me-- not from doing anything, really. It doesn't stop me from working in a dangerous place with dangerous people, it doesn't stop me from flying or driving too fast or doing things I know I'm not qualified or capable of doing. It doesn't stop me from loving or losing or taking risks. It doesn't stop me from eating salty and fatty foods, or from going downtown to see a show. It doesn't stop me saying how I feel. But it does haunt me in a way-- I know the darkness of the wicked is always there, even when it's not. It's fastening its seatbelt and returning its tray and its seat-back to the upright position next to me.
And it's always letting me know, never letting me forget that, deep down, where it counts the most, I'm still a sissy with a bowlcut and an aqua blue sweatsuit, hiding under the snack table, fighting back tears with everything I've got.
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