My parents describe me as being a pretty laid back child, maybe too laid back. Trusting, kind, social butterfly. I remember bolting onto the school bus the first day of kindergarten without a glimpse of concern for the great unknown. Probably because I was so preoccupied with showing off my Dorothy Hamill haircut and my brand new (empty) school bag. Looking back, I feel bad for my mom. I’m sure she wouldn’t have minded an extra tight hug or a breath of hesitation on my part. I offered neither.
I fell out of a treehouse once and aside from having the wind knocked straight out of me, I don’t remember crying or being too concerned. This was a little odd because it was a actually quite a bad fall and could have ended much worse than it did. All of the adults swooped in and insisted I lay down for the remainder of the day. I do recall my tailbone feeling pretty clobbered so the insistence of rest was wise, but overall, I didn’t feel phased by the accident.
So my fear of fire in the night was a little unusual for a kid of typically chill nature, but as Myriam reminded me in the comments of my last post, it was those elementary school fire prevention lectures that put the fear in me. To my mind, we couldn’t have enough cans of baking soda scattered around. (I thought I was the only kid traumatized by those lectures, so it was good to hear from you, Myriam.) This fear of fire – which I’m happy to say is no longer part of my psyche – came up one other time as a kid. I was cat-sitting for a neighbor when I accidentally locked myself in their garage. The only doors to the outside were the garage doors themselves, and they would not open manually. Being a garage-less kid, I was clueless. I figured there had to be some way to get out of there, and I did find a couple of benign looking buttons on the wall, but there were wires connected to them and when I traced those wires to their source, they led to a big metal box on the ceiling that had all sorts of “warning! high voltage!” stickers on it. In fairness, I felt confident those buttons were not actual bomb detonators as my imagination had me believe, but at age nine, my imagination was still winning out most days, and the prospect of burning down my friend’s house with her cat inside did not feel very appealing. Plus, I didn’t have my life saving can of baking soda with me, which meant the cat and I would definitely die if this went wrong. (Don’t think baking soda works on electrical fires anyway. Details…) So after some time spent pacing and working myself into a tizzy, I did the next logical thing: I found a heavy tool and smashed one of the small square windows out of the garage door, then climbed my tiny adrenaline-filled body through the shard-edged opening, gaining a few gashes along the way. I ran through the woods towards home, and collapsed in a tearful heap as I retold what had happened to my father. For sure I’d be grounded after smashing the neighbors' window. Instead, he just smiled, handed me a box of bandaids, and suggested we head to the hardware store for supplies so we could replace the glass later that afternoon. On the way to the store, I learned all there was to know about how automatic garage doors work. And I haven’t smashed my way out of a garage since.