S is for Scary

I was inexplicably scared of many things as a child.  The sound of an air conditioning unit or loudly flushing toilet sent me fleeing in horror, and those were just the normal fears.  Here are a few of the other, less standard things that incited terror in my young heart.

1.  Loved ones wearing costumes (Strangers in costumes? Totally fine)

My grandparents were relatively young when I was born--Meemaw was in her late fifties, and Pappaw was in his mid-sixties.  One night when I was two or three years old, they decided it would be funny to show up at our house dressed as really, really old people, hobbling on canes and speaking in croaky voices.  They whitened their hair and applied makeup to make their faces seem extremely wrinkled.  Mom played along and pretended they were two total strangers.  Meemaw was carrying a baby doll wrapped in a blanket like a real baby, because this was all an elaborate ruse to make me believe this baby had been entrusted to me by two mysterious strangers of the night. 

Mom invited the elderly "strangers" inside, and they approached me as though meeting me for the first time.

Their plan began to unravel when I took one look at them and realized these people were Meemaw and Pappaw, except something was horribly, horribly wrong.  Some evil wizard had sucked away their youth, and apparently their memories as well.  And my stupid mother had let these zombie-grandparents into our home without a second thought.  If I was going to survive, I had to accept that these were no longer the grandparents I loved, but mere empty husks now bent on sucking the youth out of me as well.  As you can imagine, that's a lot for a toddler to process.

If this is your idea of humor, then yes, this night was hilarious.

2.  Babies

Sensing the tension in the room, Meemaw skipped ahead and gave me the doll she had brought me, hoping to distract from the psychotic meltdown I was having.

It was a rubber doll designed to be a reasonable facsimile of a real, sleeping baby, right down to the fact that its eyes were closed.

It took the rest of the night to calm me down, and even then, "calm" is a strong word.  By the time Meemaw and Pappaw left, I had achieved a state of quiet hyperventilation.  Meemaw later painted eyes on the doll so that I would grudgingly play with it.

3.  Costumes again

That wasn't the last of my costume phobia.  When I was a little older, Pappaw wanted to surprise me one Halloween by dressing up as the scarecrow, my favorite character from The Wizard of Oz.  He and Meemaw spent hours on his costume, and when he made his grand entrance into the living room, looking forward to seeing the delight on his sweet granddaughter's face, I shrieked violently and bolted upstairs, where I took sanctuary on the top landing and had to be coaxed down to continue my night of trick-or-treating.

4.  Anything without a face, really

Several years later, Meemaw and Pappaw took a trip through Amish country and brought back an authentic Amish doll for me.  Amish dolls traditionally don't have faces.  At all.  Absolutely no facial features.  An ideal gift for the girl who was horrified of a sleeping baby doll.  Although I didn't panic as badly as I did with the eyeless doll-baby, I was obviously not warming up to the Amish doll.

So, yet again, Meemaw added facial features to the doll to assuage my fears, except this time she sewed them on.  Sorry, Amish people.

5.  Passing vehicles

Like many families, we lived on a street.  It wasn't a particularly busy street, but cars passed our house on a regular basis.  I had been given the standard warning not to approach any strangers in a car and to come inside if an unfamiliar car pulled down the driveway.  I took this to mean all cars were bent on kidnapping and murdering me, so I decided my safest bet was to treat every vehicle like approaching doom.  When I was playing in the yard and heard the approaching roar of a car, I sprinted from wherever I was to the safe area behind the house and crouched there, out of sight, until the sinister sound of the passing car faded into the distance.

On the bright side, I got plenty of exercise, and I was never kidnapped.

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R is for Rated R

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M is for Marbles

Each time Meemaw and Pappaw visited us--which was often, since they lived ten minutes away--Pappaw brought me a palm-sized bag of marbles, wrapped in stretchy plastic netting.  Together, we poured each bag into a large, clear glass jug.  I watched them trickle over the other marbles, clinking against the glass.  When we moved, the weight of the nearly-full jug had left permanent indentations in the living room carpet.

It was July 1999, just after my eleventh birthday.  We packed all our belongings into a lumbering yellow rental truck and made a six-hour trek from the white sand beaches of the Gulf Coast to the gentle plateaus of the Appalachian foothills.  We arrived at our new rental house late in the afternoon, already exhausted before we even began the task of unloading the truck.  We were elated when two neighbors walked over and offered to help.

We gathered around the truck.  Someone lowered the metal ramp and lifted the door with a deep rumble like thunder. 

And with a gentle, steady hiss, like an enormous wave washing over us, hundreds of marbles poured over the ramp, bouncing onto the gravel driveway.  We stood in silence as they collected at our feet.  Each time all the marbles seemed to finally trickle out of the truck, a new tide would swell from the dark recesses of boxes and furniture and gush across the ramp.

When we moved out of the rental house eight months later, we were still finding marbles embedded in the gravel, sometimes whole, sometimes crushed, the occasional glinting reminder of those years spent pouring tiny bags of marbles into a jug.

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J is for Just Kidding

While I was visiting my parents last month (and watching way too many back-to-back episodes of House Hunters), my dad went to the doctor.  He called us on his way home, and I answered the phone.

My dad did this.  He really did.

This probably explains a lot about my twisted sense of humor.

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Titanic

My mom and I both had birthdays this week.  That means two things:

1.  I totally ruined my mom's 31st birthday by forcing her to hobble around with a two-week-overdue baby inside her.
2.  I totally ruined all my mom's subsequent birthdays by overshadowing them with my own impending festivities.  I did buy her a really nice pair of Adidas one year, though.

My mom has put up with a lot of other things from me over the years, especially my obsessive personality.

When I was five, any time I rode in the car, the song "Part of Me, Part of You" by Glenn Frey had to be played on repeat while I sang along and pretended I was recording a music video in the fold-down mirror.

Our car had a cassette player, so we had to wait each time while the tape re-wound.

I was convinced a music mogul would pass us on the highway one day, see my burgeoning talent, and give me a record deal.  Sure, I was five, and I looked like a boy due to the pixie cut I'd insisted on getting earlier that year, but I didn't care.  My stylists would figure out a way to make me look like a nineteen-year-old model.

But that was all just a precursor to the most epic obsession of my childhood.

When I was nine, I saw Titanic eight times. 

Most of those were with my mother, the only person with the patience, love, and mental fortitude to indulge my Leonardo DiCaprio-fueled obsession with a movie that was more than three hours long.

The first time, my parents and I all enjoyed the movie equally.

Even the second time, I like to think Mom got a hint of enjoyment out of seeing the movie again.

The third time, I argued that my best friend had to see the movie.

Meemaw and Pappaw saw it with me.

But Mom bore the brunt of my Titanic craze.

Sometimes, we'd go to the theater intending to see another movie, until I inevitably noticed Titanic was still playing.

The worst part was, my nine-year-old brain was incapable of fully comprehending the tragedy playing out on the screen.  While Mom was forced to sit through the same gut-wrenching scenes eight times, I remained completely unaffected.

I didn't realize what a terrible thing I'd done to my mother until I re-watched Titanic last year for the first time since my childhood.

 

 

 

 Some kids need therapy because of their parents.  My parents probably need therapy because of me. 

They'll have to settle for this blog post for now, though.

Happy birthday, Mom!

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The Anne Frank Game

I spent a lot of time at my grandparents' house as a child.  We lived with them for nearly a year when I was four.

At some point, my grandmother told me the story of Anne Frank, minus the part where they all get caught and sent to concentration camps. 

I became deeply fascinated by Anne Frank, and Meemaw invented a game in which I was Anne Frank and she was some other, less glamorous member of the family.  We'd sneak upstairs and try to be as still and quiet as possible.

Inevitably, Meemaw's role in the game would require that she go downstairs to fend off some Nazis or stage a rendezvous with the German neighbor who smuggled us our groceries.

Meanwhile, I stuck to my post in the secret annex, thinking how nice Meemaw was to play the lesser role that involved going downstairs to the boring part of the house.

Eventually, Meemaw would return from the perilous outside world with a snack she'd scavenged.

The Nazis always lost the war just in time for Rugrats, or dinner, or both.

When I think of the Anne Frank game now, I am in awe of my grandmother's ingenious ploy to keep me out of trouble for hours at a time and simultaneously teach me about World War II.

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