Ripshit Heart

Thursday, March 20, 2008

My Showbiz Career

I'm not counting the time my mother made me take a drama class in order to, like, make me get over shyness or something. That was a fiasco-- I didn't want to get on stage, but ended up with a part in one of the plays where I had 3 lines, one of them being funny. Of course, I had no idea that the line "it's unconstitutional" was supposed to be a joke, so when people laughed when I said it, I was mortified. No, we'll forget about that for now.

I'm blaming Gareth for my lack of showbiz career actually. It's all Gareth's fault-- he was the first boy I ever had a crush on. He sat next to me in class and was always drawing pictures of dragons and making up stories about wizards and other such mystical beings whose main focus is to slay dragons. I tried to join in on his stories; he'd start one, and I'd add some details to further the plot along which were always rejected by him, so eventually I stopped. I preferred instead to gaze at his wondrous 8-year-old beauty out of the corner of my eye while I drew pictures of cats and unicorns and the occasional dragon.

Gareth was the perfect man for me at age 7 (he was a year older; I envisioned him as the wise Seventeen-Going-on-eighteen to my Sixteen-Going-On -Seventeen when we were older and married and did things like sang musical numbers together, because that's what grown-ups did, wasn't it?). He was smart, but not obnoxious about it, polite almost to the point of suspicion (what COULD that boy be hiding behind all those "thank you's" and "pardon me's"?), good looking (tall and skinny with a mop of brown hair), and of course... those stories about dragons had me hooked from the first moment I heard his name. Gareth. It had an ethereal, musical sound. His Welsh accent (he had been born in Wales and come to NY in the middle of that year) was exotic and mysterious, like the way he said "helly-copter" instead of "hell-ih-copter." I would hear his voice in my head repeating "helly-copter" and I would inwardly swoon as I said it to myself in what I thought was his accent.

That summer, Gareth and I went to the same day-camp for kids whose parents worked and didn't have time to deal with them during the day during summer vacations. The culimation of this day-camp's activities would be the final day, when we would have an International Festival, complete with food, ethnic-esque dancing, plays and general multi-cultural merriment. When Gareth's and my group convened to decide what our role would be in the celebration of culture, Gareth proposed that we put on a play about a dragon in Wales. The high-school kids who were running the program had no idea what Wales was, so our play was entitled "The Dragon of Great Britain," with Gareth starring as the dragon.

Though I longed to play the part of the damsel in distress who eventually makes friends with the dragon (the dragon turns out to be friendly and just wants to play after all), the thought of having to get on stage made me queasy, and I opted to paint scenery and make props instead, all the while gazing dreamily upon Gareth in his papier-Maché dragon head and green cape.

Fast forward a few months to fall-- all my friends had made it into the Syracuse children's chorus, the highest honor I could possibly imagine. I knew I was a better singer than at least Cara, my Perfect Friend with the Perfect Family; she obviously only made it in because she could sing loudly. Cara belted out her tunelessness and off-key mistakes and with self-confidence and an air of authority. I *knew* I was a better singer. When Cara and I put on "shows" (i.e., subjected our parents to watching us perform songs from Annie and The Sound of Music), I was always the better singer who learned the songs more quickly. Cara might have been from a stable family with flags planted firmly in the upper middle classes for generations, but I was the better singer.

I learned the song that the older kids had to sing for their auditions: "Swanee River"-- I wasn't going to sing the mamby-pamby "My Country 'tis of Thee" that was the default song for kids my age. I even took care to dress in the uniform of the choir, dark blue skirt with a white blouse, although the only dark blue skirt I had was one my great-aunt had made for me out of denim with subtle, yet sparkly silver threads woven into it, another hallmark of my weird bohemian background. Despite this, I was ready. I was going to be a star. I knew that once I made my mark on Onandaga County's music scene, it wouldn't be long before some director noticed my incredible singing and made me the next Annie. When I was a little older, I'd make the transition to Liesl in The Sound of Music.

Sheet music in hand, I sat swinging my legs on the wooden chair in the hall outside the audition room. I could hear the piano chords of "My Country 'Tis of Thee" coming through the door and snickered quietly to myself. The singing stopped and I waited impatiently a few minutes for my turn, trying in vain to hear what the previous auditioner was saying. The door opened and out walked Gareth, his parents, and his younger sister Cerys, who was also auditioning for the choir. Gareth's audition appointment was right after mine, I discovered as our mothers, who knew each other from something or other, chatted.

I paced. I sweated. My musical mellow had been rudely harshed by the sight of my beloved, who should have brought me inspiration, but instead made me panic and feel slightly nauseous with shyness. I somehow made it through "Swanee River" and some vocal exercises, but my previously obvious shining talent hadn't dazzled anyone into instantly casting me as so much as an understudy for the choir. Gareth and Cerys had made it in as had Cara (surprise, surprise), and my friends Becky and Emily, but all I did on Thursday nights while they were rehearsing beautiful tunes and planning to tour the world, bringing joy to all with their angelic harmonies, was draw pictures of dragons in my bedroom. Thus ended my brief, thrilling, and entirely imaginary showbiz career.

Saturday, September 08, 2007

Now that Grandfather is gone, I regret that I never taped him talking about WWII, like I had always planned to. I used to ask him about it sometimes, but he wasn't very forthcoming with answers.

The first time I asked him one day to tell me about the War, I was about 10 or 11. It went a little something like this...

ME: tell me a war story

GRANDFATHER: well, what kind of war story?

ME: I don't know; do you have any war stories?

GRANDFATHER: Well I don't know what you want to know about.

ME: Uh.... did you blow stuff up?

GRANDFATHER: No, because in order to blow stuff up, you have to use a bomb. Bombs are dropped from airplanes. I was on a ship.

ME: (after a long pause) Did you... cause things to explode?

GRANDFATHER: No, because in order to make things explode, you need to use a bomb, which are dropped from airplanes, and I was on a ship, not an airplane.

SWEETIE (butting in): SIDNEY, TELL HER WHAT IT WAS LIKE IN THE WAR!

GRANDFATHER: Well, we *did* shoot down the Japanese planes with machine guns that were on the ship... but we didn't cause them to blow up.

The next time I asked him about the war was a couple of years later. He chuckled as he told me about being in the Pacific and not able to get to a supply ship because the Japanese were bombing the supply ships or something. Thus the entire crew of the ship were forced to eat chipped beef on toast for a month. He actually giggled as he told me it was called "SH... well... (whispered) shit. on a shingle." He could never eat that particular dish again. The mere sight of shit on a shingle still made him feel queasy.

Last year at Christmas, Grandfather took me aside and said that all the screaming children made him really agitated. In the War, before the Japanese fighters would attack, it would be very still and silent. Then there would be noise and chaos, and my sister's kids brought back the same panicky feelings of being on board a ship with kamikaze pilots crashing on deck.

Monday, January 08, 2007

Great changes took place in American Culture in the 1970s. Prosperity allowed the middle classes to remodel their kitchens into hues of orange, olive, brown and harvest gold, many of which are rental properties that retain their earth-tone glory to this day. Women's Lib caused more women to enter the workforce, creating latchkey kids and probably bolstering adolescent drug use. Baby Boomers, ever tired of not having wash-and-wear instant gratification in all things, divorced in large numbers, leaving kids to be shuffled around between parents for weekends and holidays.

How did one segment of the middle class cope with these changes? By embracing whole grains. If you can't change what's going on in the outside world, one can change himself from the inside out, starting with eating copious amounts of wheat germ. A mother can't show her love to her children while they are at daycare, but she can lavish them with a nice dinner of lentil loaf with homemade yogurt sauce when they get home.

in 1976 my mother joined a food co-op, which met once a week in the lunchroom of the elementary school a couple of towns over. This allowed her to schmooze with other like-minded healthy moms as well as acquire brown rice by the bucketful at near third-world prices.

In another fit of healthy living, my mother also outlawed sugar and sweets. From a young age, my sister and I were instructed to politely turn down candy if we were offered it. Never mind the fact that Mom ate Haagen Daaz chocolate-chocolate chip ice cream straight from the tub while we were sleeping—sugar would make us hyper, rot our teeth, and turn us into mindless sugar craving zombies.

Halloween was a cruel joke, as mom took us trick-or-treating to 2 or 3 houses, and then were allowed to pick 3 things to keep (items we could eat excluded Reese's peanut butter cups, Hershey Kisses or other things my parents liked).

Denied processed food, I began experimenting with alternative snacks. Paper was abundant in school, so clean, white and flat. Nothing approximated this whiteness in my house, where the walls and sheets that were white in other peoples’ houses were brightly colored to my parents' bohemian tastes. Ripping old spelling papers into little pieces under my desk, I put little balls of paper in my mouth until they became moist and chewy. The taste was pulpy, not unpleasant-- if you ripped a bit with ditto ink on it, it gave it a peppery flavor.

Another smooth, white abundant school material was library paste. It had a sweet, slightly chemical smell to it, which didn't linger in the taste at all. Pasty, flavorless, and left a sticky film in your mouth, I stuck to the paper.

Crayons were next on my list. I couldn't eat my own crayons, because I only got one box a year. Thus I took to eating the communal 2nd grade crayons, the broken and shredded bits left behind for those who forgot their crayons to use. Crayons had a pleasant texture, though the taste wasn't that memorable. I thought the different colored crayons would taste different, but alas, th sumptuous Sienas, Umbers, Mulberrys, and Aquamarines that Crayola gave us all had the exact same waxy flavor with the slightly acrid aftertaste. Now, whenever I eat Starburst candies, I am reminded of the pleasing texture of crayons.

Every year at Christmastime, we brought down a gingerbread house from where it lay packed in newspaper in its box in the attic. It was about the size of a birdhouse, with frosting trim, candies on the walls, a picket fence made from candy canes, and even "stained glass windows" made from melted hard candy. It looked delicious, and every year I begged to eat it. Of course I was never allowed to, and I just got told the story of Hansel and Gretel again. My longing for candy and sweets was turned into a "what if there's a witch who lives in there?" game. I played along, though I knew that if a witch lived in this house, she would be too tiny to be too scary--a fly swatter would probably neatly dispatch any witch leaving me to and eat her house in peace.

Every year the little gingerbread house got a little more derelict and shabby. The carefully placed icing began falling off in chunks, the swirly red and white peppermints around the doors cracked and crumbled, one of the windows fell out from where I had secretly licked it. by the third year, even a very tiny child-eating witch would be hard-pressed to live in this ramshackle gingerbread hovel. I asked Mom if I could eat it now.

Finally, the moment I was waiting for. She said I could eat the entire house! Every year I had gotten the lecture about how cake your make for building things doesn't taste good, because it has to be sturdy to hold together (but I don't CARE!!). With another small warning, she told me to eat the house. I thought a moment, deciding on which area I should start on. Then, I positioned my mouth at the corner of the roof and took a big bite. My teeth stayed in place on the roof; no tasty morsel came off for me to chew.

Crunching some of the deliciously pasty-sweet petrified icing, I examined at the slightly soggy bite marks I had left on the roof. Where I had scraped the icing off with my teeth, the inner structure of the house was reavealed to be-- corrugated cardboard.

"It's not gingerbread, it's cardboard!"
"I told you it would taste awful after all these years."
"No, it's REALLY cardboard, look!"
"Hmm. Well, I guess you learned your lesson then!"

To this day I'm not exactly sure what lesson I learned. I'm guessing it may be related to the lesson I learned when I discovered I was old enough to make my own dietary decisions and binged on an entire bag of gummy worms when I was in high school. I was on a massive sugar high until I fell asleep on my friend's kitchen floor, waking up the next day with the biggest sugar hangover ever.

You'd think the opposite, but I really don't have a sweet tooth now. Go figure?

Saturday, November 26, 2005

I'm not sure how I stumbled upon this, but I came tot he website of Hidden Valley 4-H camp. Just looking at the pictures makes me shudder remembering that place. I went for 5 years, under the false claim by my mother that "this year it will be better!" Somehow, I actually believed her. I really believed that the rednecks who got sent to this welfare camp would be nice to me, and that I'd enjoy things like basket weaving and sand candle making (where you dig a hole, put some string in it, and then the counselor pours molten wax into it because you're too little to do it yourself).

Other activities included: Being Picked On in the Woods, Being Called Names in a Small Boat, Having Your friends Avoid You (every year I went with a friend, and every year she would ignore me claiming "my mother told me to make new friends.") Drinking Sulphur-Flavored Water, Getting Mosquito bites in the Rain, and Singing Totally Cheese-Ass Songs. It was a nature-filled environment brimming with favoritism and elitism.

It's amazing-- since this camp was state-subsidized, and you could get scholarships to attend, the difference between the haves and the have-nots was fairly small (it cost $90 a week when I went there). However, the non-scholarship kids could smell the scholarships on the poorer kids, and made sure they knew their place in the white trash food chain of life, even though we were all hicks from various remote places in central NY state. The "city kids" were from the booming metropolis of Binghamton. Everyone else was from some post-industrial wasteland town nobody has ever heard of.

The one cool thing about that camp was that I could change my name every year. I seriously think that was one of the major reasons I kept going back--I got to meet a whole different crop of strangers whom I would never see again, who would call me Nicolette or Tegan or something for the week. Yeah, I was obsessed with Dr. Who. I was Tegan one year, and Nyssa the next (I changed my last name that year, too to Cockburn, since I was really into Bruce Cockburn).

The other cool thing was when I was bored one day, and claimed to have seen a ghost (I was there during my supernatural-obsession phase). It was awesome, because instantly all the redneck girls in my cabin freaked out and told their friends, and soon a story started circulating about Some Kid who had gone swimming in the man-made lake and ended up falling over the dam and now his ghost haunts the camp. Never mind the fact that the dam hardly ever has water going over it in the summer because the water level is too low. Never mind the fact that nobody would ever want to swim in the murky water filled with jagged, blackened, rotting dead trees anyway, or that the "beach" area is at the opposite end from the dam. Somehow, This Kid snuck out and decided to go swimming at night (braving the mile hike through the forest. Of course he wanted to swim in the lake rather than in the perfectly good swimming pool located right where the dining hall was). I enjoyed how the story got more and more detailed the longer it circulated. I didn't even have to tell the story. All I did was plant the seed by claiming to have seen the ghost--everyone else took over. I just sat back and watched what I created.

Trailer trash girls from across the tri-county area slept just a little bit worse, lying in their WWII surplus bunks with just the sound of the crickets chirping, the retarded girl snoring, the mosquitoes whining, and the high-pitched buzzing of the cars zooming around the NASCAR track that was across the valley. Knowing that made me sleep just a little bit better.

Thursday, October 20, 2005

I was adopted because infertility runs in my family. All the female descendents of the Schoenwalds have adopted kids. I'm not sure where they went wrong--maybe it is a good thing, though. Apparently my Great-Grandmother Laura (after whom my mother was named) was kind of a freak. My Great-Aunt Julia remembers things that she won't share with anyone out of embarassment and/or shock and horror. Among the things she will share:

GGM Laura used to stand naked in front of the windows of their ground-level apartment on a busy NY street. She also used to like to kiss grandfather on the mouth, even when he got "Too old." I only know of the woman who, when her children complained of being bored, she would tell them to "go count their pubic hairs." Of course, she did this in Hungarian, which makes it a quaint olde worlde story.

I think it's a blessing that my mother didn't get to pass on her genes. It's proof that there really is some sort of God-Like being out there, that he or she saw fit to smite my mother's womb, and at the same time cause the end of my father's rather freakish line. He's an only child. We're his only adopted children. My grandmother's genes stop with him, and that's really not such a bad thing considering.

Although she was not able to carry a baby to full term, Moth was able to get pregnant; she just had a lot of miscarriages. One time she got knocked up by her psycho boyfriend Everett when I was about 12. I remember distinctly the whole discussion about abortion, and how it's good that women still have the right to choose. My sister cried, because she wanted a baby sister. Moth assured her that any kid she would have, should she even be able to give birth to a baby, would be retarded, because that's what happens when people over 40 have kids. "Do you really want a retarded baby sister? It'll be like having a baby sister for the rest of your life, because she won't ever mentally age!" This made my sister calm down a bit.

Moth decided to go to Syracuse (40 miles away) to have the abortion. I was chosen to accompany her on this mission. On the way there, she regaled tales of how everyone she knows has had at least one abortion. Even my grandmother aborted a kid ("I should say 'fetus' because it's not actually a baby yet) back in the 20's before it was even legal! My aunt apparently got kicked out of her Scary Fundamentalist Christian Cult because she had "too many abortions!" So, I got to sit in the waiting room of the doctor's office reading Highlights for Children and watching the tropical fish in the aquarium swim in and out of their fake sunken ship while my half-sibling-fetus was aborted.

I am not pro-life by any stretch of the imagination, and I know my convictions are strong because probably having to sit through your mother's abortion while she talks casually about it as if she were getting a cavity filled would probably make anyone scarred for life. However, it was a few weeks after the abortion that things started to go wrong. She went back to the doctor, and he tried to tell her that she had a Molar Pregnancy which happens to 1 out of 1000 people. She described it as when the embryo actually turns into cancer. She didn't think this was true.

It turns out that the doctor just didn't remove all the fetus.
"You mean they left, like an arm or a leg behind?"
"Well, sort of. Maybe. It's not really a baby yet. It could just be a bunch of cells."

We went back to the doctor and again I got to read Highlights while she argued with the doctor about malpractice. All the way home she made remarks like "that cocksucker! Who does he think he is?"

Eventually the problem was corrected, though I didn't know exactly how, nor do I really want to know. And she wonders why I don't have any kids now!

Tuesday, March 22, 2005

Some kids fantasize about being adopted, and that their real parents are movie stars or royalty or whatever. I never had to fantasize-- I *was* adopted, and I *knew* my Real Parents were the coolest ever. They had to be, they were British. Of course, they had told my current pseudo-parents that I was 1/2 Vietnamese, but that was obviously just a ploy to get some barbaric Yanks to take their child. Sure, I had the semi-slanty eyes and the black straight hair, but that was because my father was Irish. Irish of course; black Irish in fact. My false mother and grandimpostors had talked about the Black Irish--they came from the North of Ireland, and had black hair, unlike the red hair and freckles that everyone else in Ireland had. My faux-Nana would know, since her own father traveled from that faraway, misty land with nothing but either the orange wooden trunk in the living room, the plain wooden one in the attic, or possibly the pine one with the red and white checkered paper inside that stood in her spare room.

Of course I was Irish and Englich-- a forbidden breed-- I had to be given away immediately, lest either party's family discovered that they had been cavorting with the enemy. My parents' forbidden love eventually led to my Real Father sacrificing his life so that my mother could smuggle me out of the old country to a new promised land. She had meant for me to live with some brilliant writer or movie star until she could be with me again. Unfortunately, papers were mixed up, and I ended up in this post-industrial wasteland town in central NY with a set of divorced hippie freaks and a younger sister obviously from another planet.

I had nothing to do with those strange-sounding peasants in pointy hats toiling in rice paddies, or being shot by American soldiers that you sometimes saw on tv. I didn't even identify with the little girl who was born to an American soldier, and needed the aid of the Bionic Woman to reunite her with a reluctant father when she was hanging off a cliff, crying, in the rain.

No, I was definitely a Brit, it was obvious. I liked tea. I prefered the Thompson Twins to Michael Jackson. I said things like /la BOR a tree/ and spelled COLOUR with a u, even though Mrs. Meade, my science teacher would circle every single occurrence of COLOUR and FLAVOUR in my la-BORE-a-tree reports in red felt-tip pen that soaked through to the other side of the pages. Every red stain on the back of a page was the symbolic blood I shed for my True Homeland.

How did I explain my lack of a British accent? I didn't even dare mimic an accent; it was a thing too sacred for the likes of me to utter. It dawned on me one day in class while we were studying geography (I was obviously not one of these American philistines, since I knew all the provinces of Canada, as well as all the states, capitals, major rivers and mountain ranges when all we had studied was the states).

I was Canadian! After all, Canadians were just Brits without the accents, right? They still spelled COLOUR with a "u" and had a Parliament. My Queen (God Bless her) was even on their coins!

My hippie freak parents had raised me to think of Canada as the Promised Land, with their liberal government and nationalized health care. We took every vacation to Canada, since it was a foreign country, and just 3 hours away. Canada was different. Each family trip we took, as soon as we crossed the border, my mother would remark, "oh look at those houses; they just look so CANADIAN!" and "look at those cows. You can tell they are Canadian. American cows just don't look like that!" Then we would all take turns making fun of her observations, saying things like, "moo, eh?" But, deep down inside, we knew that they really were different.

I invented a home town for myself-- London, British Columbia. British Columbia because it had the word "British" in it of course. It was also on the West Coast-- way too far from any of the mere mortal Americans to ever check up on. London? Self-explanatory. I'm not sure if there actually is a town called London in BC, but Americans were obviously too inferior to ever do anything like look it up on a map, so I was safe in telling all my friends about my heritage.

Because my younger sister was such a brat, she had to be replaced. Thus, I suddenly had two brothers, 10 and 12 years older than I, who had been born in our true Native Land of Merry Olde England. John and Curt, both greatly underappreciated musicians, had decided to return to the motherland because America had such crappy music.

Upon learning about my two brothers (a friend's mother had inquired about when they would be visiting), my maternal impersonator laughed, offended that I would think that she could have ever have named a child "John Burch" like the John Birch Society. "Do you know what that is?" she asked condescendingly, forcing me to roll my eyes so hard I nearly gave myself a headache. (Of course I didn't let on thet my brothers had been named after my two favorite bass players, John Taylor of Duran Duran and Curt Smith of Tears For Fears, both upstanding, proud young Englishmen.)

Pseudo-Mom was often sarcastic about my brothers, asking me sweetly, "so, how are your brothers today? Are they coming to visit their dear old mother who had them when she was 18 and 20 soon?" I didn't have the heart to tell her that they weren't my adopted brothers; they were from a family whose hallmark was genetic perfection. Thus, I sulkily would declare, "FINE. John's band is playing at a really cool club tomorrow." She would alternate between amused and concerned about my mental well-being.

I almost believed that my imaginary brothers would take me away from my inferior life someday. I would fantasize that I'd be sitting in class, and they'd magically appear, with a friendly "cheerio, old girl!" and with a "well, time to go now is it?" take me away back to the land of bangers and mash, where people wouldn't look at me funny when I called parts of a car the "boot" and the "bonnet." In fact, they'd remark at how I talked like one of Them; like aliens on Dr. Who. Everyone in the universe speaks with a British accent- Dr. Who proved that (so much superior to Star trek, though I religiously watched that as well when I managed to be at a house with a forbidden-by-my-mom tv).

Alas, my brothers never came to claim me. My mother is way too poor and frail, and filled with sorrow to ever leave her country cottage by the sea to come and get me. I'll have to go with plan B: be a movie star, so that they can all see me in a movie and instantly recognize me and write me a letter. Then I'll use some of my billions of dollars to buy us all a nice palatial yet cozy castle on a cliff overlooking the sea, and we'll have lots of cats and be in a band.

Monday, September 27, 2004

The thought of crossing streets terrified me until I was about 18. Luckily, I've grown out of that, but occasionally the terror still comes back. I can remember going to the Campfire Girls meeting at the library, and waiting for 20 minutes to cross the street. I was about 7, and knew I was about to die. Luckily, the guy from the Shell station in front of which I was waiting came over and helped me cross safely.

When I was 3, we went to a zoo, and the walkways between the animal cages were paved; they looked like roads. I was scared silly to walk on them, thus Moth & Pad had to carry me all over the zoo, a fact which they will never let me live down! When they finally convinced me to put my feet down, a police car drove up the walk, freaking me out of my mind.

Moth's scare tactics worked! We lived on a fairly busy road, and from the time I could walk, Moth drilled into my head that streets = death. If I went into the street, I would definitely die, or at least get maimed like The Kid Up The Street. I never saw him, because he couldn't get out of bed. He was bedridden, of course, due to the horrific injuries he sustained from not heeding the "Stop, Look, and Listen" rule. When we sang the SL&L rule in nursery school to the tune of "Puff the Magic Dragon," it took on a whole new sinister meaning for me.

It might have been the same kid, or maybe his brother, who was responsible for the Safety Pin Incident. This unruly youth had decided it might be fun to stick a safety pin into a wall socket. He was electrocuted, his hair caught on fire, then he died painfully. I was scared, especially since I had never even dreamed of sticking a pin in a wall socket. Was it really fun? What would inspire a "boy about my age" do such a thing?

The Abandoned Refrigerator lecture was similar in nature, only the poor unlucky Kid Up The Street was not involved, thank goodness. This misadventure befell some poor souls from "Buffalo." They were playing hide-and-seek in a dump, and one misguided child decided to hide in a refrigerator. It slammed shut, and he was unable to open it, and suffocated to death.

The Abandoned Refrigerator was fascinating. I spent a lot of time in various junkyards, getting auto parts with my uncle, or dumping garbage with my grandfather-- dumps were really fun. They were like playgrounds with that special kick of danger that causes "fun" to turn into "awesome!" I had never encountered an abandoned refrigerator, but I was full of questions-- Why couldn't the kid get out of the fridge? Couldn't he just push the door open, or do refrigerators lock in a special way that I never knew about because I'd never gone inside one? Why would anyone go into one in the first place? Were they really really fun?

From then on I lived in fear that someday I would come upon an old refrigerator and not be able to stop myself from going in. It wasn't the suffocating that scared me per se, it was the fact that I wouldn't be able to control myself once I saw one, and it would lure me to my doom.

A couple years ago I was walking to the bus in Allston, and there were 3 ancient harvest gold-colored refrigerators standing stately side-by-side on the curb outside an apartment complex awaiting trash removal. I paused. I was seriously tempted to climb inside one on that snowy grey morning. Unfortunately, at the last minute I decided to be a Grown-up and get to work on time, and to not risk probable suffocation. I still regret not having experienced it.

Another danger to children is trolley cars. Now, I had never seen a trolley car when I was 8, and I'm sure none existed in the entire central NY region. However, one night, my grandfather's friend Gabe Goldfeld and his wife (I think her name was RuthAnne?) came to dinner. It was explained to me beforehand that Gabe was in a wheelchair because he had only one leg--he lost the other when he was playing on trolley tracks as a child, and had gotten caught underneath one. I was admonished to never play on train tracks, and that trolleys were dangerous vehicles whose powers of destruction I should never underestimate.

I was confused, as trolleys seemed like a quaint thing of the past, but I filed the information away for future reference. I tried to look like I wasn't staring at Gabe's stump, with the pantleg neatly pinned up, and thought of how fun it could be to play on trolley tracks. Hadn't he heard it coming? I wanted to ask him so many questions, but I knew better. When I moved to Allston years later, I always looked both ways before crossing the trolley tracks twice, and walked quickly across them (but didn't run, as that makes one more likely to trip and fall, thus Gabe-ifying an appendage or two.)

Mayonnaise is another potentially lethal force in the world. Moth was convinced that if you left mayo out of the fridge for more than 35 seconds, it would develop a carcinogen which, when eaten, would cause one to instantly drop dead. One day, she made me a tuna fish sandwich with mayo for lunch, and sent me out the door with some fretting about how she "hoped it would be OK." When lunchtime came around, I sat staring at my sandwich. It was a bit exciting to think that my first bite might send me to my grave. I took a tiny bite, waited a few moments... I could still breathe. I felt OK. Since I didn't die, I ate the rest of my sandwich, and came home and told Moth "I'm alive!" However, she wasn't convinced that the harmful susbtance was so benign.

Years later, after I had read about the properties of Mayonnaise, and why it doesn't go bad as quickly as you think, Moth and I were in Italy. On a strict budget, we ate sandwiches from small, cheap delis. In Italy, deli-keepers left their bemayo'd sandwiches out on the counter all day. Since we didn't hear about legions of Italians dropping dead from Mayonnaise poisoning, Moth figured I was right, and lightened up on the death factor of her favorite condiment. After all, if foreigners do it, it must be OK!

You'd think I'd be a giant basket case of fears now, judging from all the tools of the Grim Reaper that lurked around, like guns (the Kid Up the Street played Russian Roulette [I had no idea what that was] and ended up brain damaged and retarded--therefore toy guns, bb guns and in some cases squirt guns were to be avoided), lawnmowers and hedge-trimmers (they could chew your leg or arm off--luckily this got me out of mowing in my teens! However, it also meant that I had to cut the 6-foot by 30-foot hedge by hand), and sliding glass doors (the girl next door really did run through one--we saw the scars). It's amazing that I'm pretty mellow about everything. In fact, I don't have any phobias that I can think of! I'm fine with spiders, rats, heights, and all those other things people are normally afraid of. I'm even ok with electric-hedge trimmers and trolleys!

Maybe Moth's irrational anti-phobias balanced them out. For example, meat wasn't bad unless it was black, AND smelled *100%* like garbage. Milk wasn't rotten unless it was no longer liquid. I ate oatmeal for breakfast every morning, picking out the moth larvae (they float to the surface if you nuke it quickly and don't let it get hot enough for them to explode). Moth demonstrates the Law of Conservation of Fears-- it's good to have an equal and opposite anti-fear for each fear.