You’re Getting Verrrry Sleeeepy

After ten years of being Earth-bound I was ready to try flying again. I have never enjoyed flying; giving up control to someone else 10,000 feet above the ground seems like more trust than any reasonable person should have in a stranger. I had decided many years ago that I simply wouldn’t fly again. I had seen too much footage of fiery or charred crash sites and went through the understandable practice of mentally putting myself in their position. Eyewitnesses say such things as, “I can’t imagine what kind of terror they were feeling” as the plane plunges earthward in the final few seconds. I guess that’s my problem, because I can imagine it. Too well. And that’s why I chose not to put myself in the position to ever experience it.

But time has passed and I now have children who I want to be able to see the world and for whom I want to be a good role model. One of my proudest parenting accomplishments is having a daughter who is not afraid of spiders so that when I see one in the house I can call to her to pick it up and take it outside. I decided that in order to overcome my fear of flying, I would need outside help. I had heard of classes that are offered at some airports to teach people what to expect and get them familiar with the surroundings they would encounter. These programs have high success rates. However, I did not live close enough to the airport for this to be practical with the limited amount of time I had each day when my youngest was at her half-day of kindergarten.

So my plan of action came from an ad I saw in a community coupon flyer sent to me in the mail. The ad was for hypnosis and offered to help you make that change you had been dreaming of, whether that involved smoking, weight, gambling, stress, or even improving your golf game. I kept the flyer on my desk for months before I finally had to courage to call in late autumn.

My conversation with the hypnotist, whom we’ll call Lana, was pleasant. She gave me the basic information, such as how long it should take to “fix” me (2 sessions), how long a hypnotherapy session usually lasted (1 ½ hours), and how much it cost ($85 a session). She gave me instructions on how to get there and then asked me a few questions.

“I just want to ask you about a couple of scenarios to make sure you are comfortable with them, because sometimes I use this imagery at the beginning to get my client to relax. Are you okay with walking through forests?”

“Yes,” I quickly replied, wondering how these things could be scary and then immediately being able to conjure up frightening ideas concerning forests, from spiders dangling in your path to startling a mother bear with her cubs.

“How about walking on the beach?”

“Yes,” I answered impulsively, before remembering scenes of the tsunami washing thousands of people to their deaths.

“Riding down an elevator?” Lana asked.

“Okay,” I said, now growing more nervous about revealing any more issues I might have. I didn’t need to explain to her that I often had nightmares about elevators with cables breaking and dangling at heart-stopping angles or the doors sliding open to reveal half of one floor and half of another, and wondering whether you should risk jumping out of this impaired machine before it zipped off to another half-floor and crushed you as it went.

“Riding down an escalator?” she continued.

“Yes,” I replied. Somewhere in there I imagined the question changed from “are you okay with this” to “do you have a fear of this,” so at least I was answering the questions honestly. Didn’t everyone have a vague fear of their pantleg or shoelace getting caught in an escalator and sucking their whole leg into its metal jaws?

“Good,” she replied. “I look forward to meeting you!”

It was then I realized that giving up my fear of flying might transfer that fear too heavily onto other areas of my life, permanently disabling me. Sure, I could fly to Florida this winter, but forget about enjoying the beach or going to the shopping mall while I was there!

The week before my first appointment brought a sense of dread. I was not looking forward to the appointment, and I couldn’t pinpoint whether that was from a general reluctance to be hypnotized or from the thought that I was going to fool my brain into thinking it was okay to fly and then actually get on a plane.

I had reasons to be uncomfortable with the thought of being hypnotized. I had been hypnotized once before. It was in high school, when a hypnotist came to do a show that involved hypnotizing a bunch of teachers and students on the stage and then having them do embarrassing things to get a laugh out of the audience. I remember being able to think rationally during my hypnosis but I was certainly open to his suggestions. As I got older I learned that it was a state not unlike having too much to drink and lowering your inhibitions. When the hypnotist had us all pretend we were driving a car and someone cut us off, we had to roll down the window, stick our hand out, and “really show the other driver how we felt”. I was told later by friends who were in the audience that I was one of only two who actually gave the finger to the pretend driver. But as the performance wore on, I started to regain control of my surroundings and wonder what the hell I was doing making an ass of myself in front of hundreds of people. Unfortunately, this slow dawning did not come soon enough, as I had already danced like a fool in front of the entire school, which was recorded on film and edited into my class’s video yearbook to haunt me for eternity. I remember driving home from the hypnotist’s show to an empty house, where I retreated to my room and cried myself to sleep. Yet here I was, ready to put myself through another hypnosis experience.

On the appointed day, I dropped my daughter off for her afternoon kindergarten class and headed for the hypnotherapy clinic. The clinic shared space with other like-minded businesses, such as an acupuncture/acupressure office. My destination was in the basement of the building, accessed through the side door. I entered and followed the signs into a lobby that was slightly partitioned off from the rest of the basement. I saw no one there, so I sat and waited. There were curtains hung against the walls to make it feel less like a cement-block basement, soft music was playing, and a tabletop fountain tinkled water pleasantly.

As I waited, I read through some of the literature on the table before finding a large binder filled with testimonials. Most of them did not apply to my situation, such as people who had come to improve their memories, quit smoking, and lose weight, among other problems. There was just one testimonial that I came across that dealt with conquering a fear. A woman had been afraid of riding in a car ever since she was in a violent collision. She reported that she was riding home from the therapy session with her husband behind the wheel when they came upon an accident. Her husband remarked to her that he was amazed she was so calm, unlike her usual reaction to simply riding in a car, much less witnessing a small crash. Her testimonial gave me hope.

Soon Lana appeared out of one of the two doors I could see from my spot in the lobby. She introduced herself and asked for payment for the session. I thought that would have been more appropriate for after the services were rendered, but I didn’t want to start off on a bad note. She didn’t tell me how much to write the check for, but I seemed to recall it was $80, so I started filling in the blanks. While I wrote, she told me that the first thing I would do is watch a video that explained about what therapy could do and how it worked. It seemed like a nice way to ease me into the hypnosis rather than plunking me down in a chair and putting me under. I finished my check, ripped it out and handed it to her. She looked at it for a second, and then said, “Oh. It’s supposed to be for eight-five dollars.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said, slightly embarrassed. “I couldn’t remember exactly.” I dug in my purse and pulled out my wallet. I didn’t have enough singles or a five, so I offered her a ten dollar bill. “Thanks, I’ll get your change while you’re watching the video,” she replied, and then led me off into another room in a distant corner of the basement.

The room was smaller than a bedroom and a tad larger than a closet. I sat down on the little green couch and she slipped in the VHS tape. She turned the lights off and left me alone while I watched the video. It was about 15 minutes long and was not terribly interesting, but it also left me bored and eager to get on with it, which was better than the apprehension I had been feeling.

When the video was over Lana came back and brought me into the room where we would be having our session. I sat in the recliner and looked around for the device that would be used to lull my brain into a moldable plastic. In the movies it is always a swinging coin and back in high school it had been a red flickering light, but I saw nothing here that fit those descriptions.

Lana spent some time talking about herself and then asked me questions about myself, trying to make me feel more at ease in the unfamiliar surroundings. I was still eager to get on with it, partly because in two hours my kids would be out of school and deposited at the bus stop by my house, and I had to be there to get them.

Finally, after a peaceful conversation among two new acquaintances, it was time to dim the lights a bit more and get into position. She leaned me back in the chair, had me close my eyes, and began her count backward from ten. But suddenly her voice went from the neutral, conversational voice she’d had since she introduced herself, into a stage voice that sounded as if she were about to conjure up dead spirits or cause my body to hover above the chair. It was all I could do to keep from bursting into laughter.

“Ten! Your eyelids are getting heavy,” she cried in a deep, sing-songy voice.

“Nine! Your arms and legs are getting heavy,” she continued.

“Eight! Every time I say a number you feel yourself falling deeper into the chair. Seven! – Oh wait, let me bring you back up for a second.”

And so I opened my eyes and twisted back to look at her, where she had positioned herself over my right shoulder.

“I forgot to tell you that if you have an itch or something like that, go ahead and scratch. Do whatever you need to do to feel comfortable.”

“Okay, thanks,” I replied, even though I was already way past my comfort level. I closed my eyes and got back into position.

“Ten! Your eyelids are getting heavy,” she started again.

“Nine! Your arms and legs are getting heavy. Eight! Oh, one more thing,” she said, briefly returning again to her normal voice. “Are you comfortable if I touch your shoulder and arm while you are under?”

I couldn’t possibly be any more uncomfortable than I already was, so why not add getting touched by a stranger during hypnosis? “That’s fine,” I answered and decided that I would do whatever I had to do to get this over with as quickly as possible.

She began her countdown for the third time and made it all the way to one this time. Then she told me that I was going to try to open my eyes but my eyelids would be too heavy and I would be unable to do so. So at her command, I rolled my eyeballs around in their sockets a bit, playing that I was making an effort, but for all practical purposes my eyelids were just glued shut. I certainly did not want to open my eyes and have to go back and start the counting routine over once more.

As Lana tried to get me deeper into the hypnotized stage, she had me count for her and imitate the things she said. It seemed to be a strategy of getting me to open up to her suggestions by first having me follow simple, nonthreatening commands. Throughout the hypnosis session, I imagined different friends and family in the room with me, and how hilarious of a predicament they would find this. I worked like mad not only to keep from laughing, but to not even crack a smile and betray what was really going on inside. Instead of giving up control to the hypnotist, I was wielding more self control than I ever had.

“And now I want you to count backward from 10, repeating it just as I have said it,” Lana intoned and then began her count. “10 … 9 … 8 … 7 … 5 … 4 … 3 … 2 … 1.”

Ah ha! I thought as I listened. Skip six, I told myself.

“10 … 9 … 8 … 7 … 5 … 4 … 3 … 2 … 1.”

“Good,” she told me, sounding very pleased with my progress. “When we are done and you awake, you will continue to count in the same way until I give you the command to correct it.” I thought it would be an interesting test of the hypnosis. I certainly felt coherent and in control and not the least bit hypnotized, but perhaps I was being sucked in without truly realizing it.

After what seemed like an eternity of trying to bring me deeper and DEEPER into hypnosis with her voice that got deeper and DEEPER, she seemed satisfied that we were ready to continue. She began by asking me to relive other experiences I’d had with airplanes. The theory that hypnosis worked on, she had told me before we’d begun, was that our fear of something such as flying was triggered by a traumatic event that we had come to associate with it.

There were certainly a few instances I’d had that I could have offered up to Lana that would have satisfied her probing. I could have blamed 9/11, although I had already quit flying by then. I could have blamed the flight I took to Florida with my boyfriend in college. I was nervous about flying, but once we got up and the captain turned off the seatbelt sign, I relaxed and smiled and turned to look at my boyfriend. He was paler than the clouds outside and was sitting hunched in a ball with his fists clenched. His terror was palpable. I tried not to let it affect me and was successful for most the flight until it came time to land. Thunderstorms lined the coast as we dipped down toward the Fort Lauderdale airport. It was nighttime, and the captain had us turn off the cabin lights, bringing darkness to the plane. As we flew through the clouds, every few seconds a bright flash of light would surround us from out every little porthole window and the plane would shake, then again darkness and calm before another flash and shake. This went on for quite a few minutes in complete silence. We never heard a crack or boom or rumble of thunder, we simply saw the lightning and felt the plane tossing. Everyone on the plane was still, breath held, waiting for what would happen next. I gripped my boyfriend’s hand and we sat there, hunched and pale together, hoping that when we reached the ground it wouldn’t be with a splat. Finally we exited the storm clouds and continued our descent until we reached the runway, with a dry and uneventful landing.

But again, my fear of flying preceded this event. Another bad experience I could have recounted was the time my family spent Christmas in Los Angeles. We were scheduled to come home on New Year’s Eve on a flight from Los Angeles to Minneapolis and then a short leg from there to Madison. When we got to LAX, we discovered that our flight had been overbooked and people were being given tickets for a free flight to anywhere in the U.S. if they were willing to take a later flight to Chicago and then on to their final destination. I was immediately worried. In my 13-year-old brain I was comfortable with the idea of taking our scheduled flight and flying home the same way that we flew here, but changing that plan might throw my fate into some situation that it was not meant for. My 17-year-old sister did not want to take the later flight because our current flight would have us home before midnight and she would be able to make a New Year’s party that she had been invited to. We were dead set against taking the new flight, and my mother was determined to get those free tickets. My father seemed to have disappeared in all this. There were copious tears, mine out of fear and my mother’s and sister’s out of frustration. We were all becoming dramatic and overwrought, tired and so far from home. At one point my mother exclaimed, “You girls have ruined everything I’ve ever wanted to do!” and soon after that my sister got up and walked off, disappearing for about 15 minutes. I glanced up through my tears at the other people waiting at the gate, wanting simultaneously to disappear from them and be saved by them. In the end, enough people took the free tickets and flight to Chicago that we were able to board our originally scheduled plane and take off. Ironically enough, when we finally got back to our house after that pain-filled day, there was a note waiting for my sister that the New Year’s Eve party planned for that night had been cancelled.

I shared none of this with Lana. My fear of flying did not begin with any of these other bad experiences, although to be fair, they certainly couldn’t have helped the situation any. Lana made me rehash every airplane flight I could remember. Things were going fine, until she made me relive an experience from when I was about four. I had to embellish some of my flights, because my memory from this time was not very clear. All I really knew was that I flew to Texas when I was young. I also remember getting off the plane to a large band playing, welcoming the governor of Texas back home who had also been on the plane with us. I had no negative memories, but if I wanted to be cured, I would have to help her find the source of my anxiety.

“Tell me how you feel, four-year-old Kelly,” Lana asked me.

“My stomach feels strange,” I replied.

“Am I talking to four-year-old Kelly?” Lana asked. Uh oh. I was doing something wrong. She couldn’t possibly want me to … no. But I had to do it.

“My tummy hurts,” I answered in a baby voice. I was so glad no video tape was being made of this hypnosis.

“And why does your tummy hurt, four-year-old Kelly?” Lana asked.

“Because I’m afwaid of the pwane,” I answered. The real four-year-old Kelly never lisped, but I wanted to be convincing.

“And why are you afraid of the plane, four-year-old Kelly?”

“Because it might cwash. I saw it on the Tee Bee.”

Bingo. Lana soothed four-year-old Kelly and told her that planes were safer than cars, that she would grow up and take many flights and they would all be fine, and that I didn’t need to be afraid of them anymore. She then talked to my present-day self and asked me to picture myself on a flight to somewhere (I picked Greece). I was supposed to picture myself relaxed, reading a book, napping, and then reaching my destination happy and calm. I was thinking that would be great, but when I have to fly with a real four-year-old girl, relaxing, reading, and napping with her next to me was probably out of the question.

At long last, Lana brought me up from the hypnosis.

“How do you feel?” she asked.

“I feel great,” I said, and I meant it. I was glad to be done and I was willing to keep faking my way for as long as I had to. Lana was thrilled with my progress. She said she didn’t expect us to get as far as we did and that there wouldn’t be any need for me to come back for a second session. She said I was the perfect type of person for hypnosis because I was very open to suggestion. I felt that was probably the farthest thing from the truth. She then asked me to fill out a testimonial for her binder in the lobby. It seemed a little early for that, as I had just come out of hypnosis, but again I complied in order to get done and get to the bus stop on time. I wrote a little paragraph about how I felt great and couldn’t wait to go to Florida. Finally, Lana released me back into the world and I skipped out of there merrily, glad to have the hypnosis session behind me.

On the drive home, I was reliving the whole experience when I suddenly remembered she still owed me five dollars. Then I remembered the backward counting and when she had me skip the number six and that she had never given me the code to retrieve it. I kept driving along in the quiet, thinking about it, when I suddenly blurted out, “SIX!”

Whew! She may have stolen my five dollars, but she hadn’t stolen my number six.

In case you're wondering, we did fly to Florida that winter.

We had a wonderful time at Disney and the ocean.

The flight home was smooth and uneventful.

And I haven't flown since.

Somebunny Needs Therapy

Pet rabbits fall into the category of “it seemed like a good idea at the time”. I was reminded of that this week because I’m in charge of taking care of my friend’s rabbit while her family is on vacation. She said I would probably only have to stop in one time during the week, on Wednesday, but on Tuesday I was worried because it had been hot, and what if their air conditioner stopped working? So my kids and I stopped by the house and went to check on the furry little bunny.

I had pet rabbits as a kid, but people who have pet bunnies these days have the more exotic, angora kind, not the run-of-the-mill rabbit I was used to. This bunny had a multi-colored coat that looked soft and cuddly, but every time we reached for him he freaked out and shot around the cage, sending his bedding and food bowl flying. When we first saw his cage, his placemat had been pulled out and looped over top of his food bowls. I wonder how long he’d had to duck his head under the placemat for the hopes of a meal. He had also kicked the “natural” bedding, which looked like ripped up insulation, so that it was covering all the food in his bowl.

I don’t know why I thought my neighbor’s bunny would be a cuddly bundle of joy, as I have never had good luck around rabbits. One of my early childhood memories involves a boy who lived across the street from my grandparents. There were lots of wild rabbits around their house, and one night this boy managed to capture one of the rabbits. As a harbinger of his future life as a serial killer, he then set the rabbit on fire. I didn’t see it happen, but the story became legend for two whole blocks of Monroe Street. If I remember correctly, the fire somehow went out and the rabbit was instead picked off by a waiting owl. (I saw a red-tailed hawk pick apart a rabbit in my yard just a few years ago. It is not pretty.)

Nearly thirty years after the “rabbit-on-fire” incident, I sat down at my computer one day to see I had a Facebook friend request from someone with a name I vaguely remembered. I clicked over to my email to send my sister a note and ask if this was the same bunny torturer from our youth, only to find an email waiting for me. My sister had written, “I got a friend request today from ____ ______. Do you remember when he set that rabbit on fire?” I friended him and scanned his info. He didn’t appear to have become a serial killer after all. He is in a band, though. Maybe he was just emulating Ozzy back in the day.

An even older memory I have also involves rabbits. One night I was at the golf course with my sister and parents. It was late on a summer night and getting dark out. My father had been on the course, picking up the flags after men’s day, and when he came back in he was very excited.

“Get in the golf cart, girls, I have something to show you.”

My father is not an excitable man. He is stoic. He is quiet. He does not draw attention to himself. So the little bit of energy bursting from him that wanted to show his girls something cool he had discovered drew the attention of other people who were in the club house.

I got in a golf cart with my parents and sister and a couple other members got in their carts and we all drove off across the manicured grass as the sky grew ever darker. My father led the way, crossing empty fairways and weaving around trees, finally taking us to a far corner of the course where the holes bordered a sheep pasture that led to forest and a high hill behind it. The hole he was aiming for was a par 3 in which the men’s and women’s tees are all cut into the side of a big hill, with the wild sheep pasture on one side and a thick clump of forest on the other. The loud putter of our engines slowed as my father tried to creep up on whatever it was he had seen that he wanted to share with us.

It was fairly dark by this point and my eyes strained to see. I remember one person having a flashlight and swinging it around the grass on the hillside between the two tees.

“The baby rabbits would be right there,” my father called out to the person with the flashlight, pointing at a dark form in the grass. “They had to have just been born when I passed them an hour ago.”

The flashlight caught the form in the grass, but I didn’t see any baby rabbits, or the mother rabbit, for that matter. All I saw was a big snake with a series of lumps in his body. Darkness pressed in all around and I couldn’t see the faces that cried out in disgust and horror. We climbed back in the carts and the loud rumble of the engine whisked us away from the carnage.

Despite my early bad associations with rabbits, somehow my parents thought it would be a good idea to keep them as pets. We had a hutch that my grandpa had made out of wood and chicken wire. Two-thirds of the cage was open to the air and there was a latch on top where you could lift the rabbits out, and the other third was enclosed so the rabbits had a place to hide when thunderstorms came. Or at least that’s what I imagined they did.

My sister and I took our rabbits out of the cage about every day. We would let them hop around the lawn and they would never go so far that we couldn’t catch them. Lots of times we brought them in the house, too, and let them roam around freely while we played in the basement with our Barbies. We would just have to pick up their trail of droppings after we put them back in their cage.

One time I was playing in the downstairs bedroom where I had a smaller doll-sized bottle that had been filled with some kind of liquid – maybe milk or juice or water, I can’t remember anymore – and it was positioned next to the open door. I heard a noise and turned around to see a nose sticking out from under the door and the mouth pulling at the bottle. I started to laugh and called to my sister, “Come over here! One of the bunnies is being so cute!” I assumed one of the rabbits was behind the door and had smelled the liquid and was giving himself a little treat. Then I looked into the living room to see my sister with the two rabbits hopping around her and looked back to the door. The creature was still there. Realizing that the door was almost completely open and there wasn’t much room for any animal on the other side, I slowly creaked the door away from the wall and sent the critter scrambling for cover. A vole had gotten into the house and was helping itself to my doll’s bottle!

The lesson I learned from this is that cats make better pets because they will take care of unwanted critters for you. Rabbits could care less.

We went through a number of rabbits each year. We didn’t keep them in the winter, but when spring came we would get our first rabbits about the same time as we got our Easter baskets. At first my sister and I would pick the prettiest rabbits that were available, black or grey or mottled, but after a while I started picking only white rabbits with red eyes. And I quit giving them different names, like Tinkerbell and Fluffy. They all became Whitey.

We got our rabbits from a man who lived a few blocks from us. He had multiple rabbit cages in his backyard and he would let us know when babies were available so we could come pick them out. We didn’t have to pay him for the rabbits, because we would give them back after a few months once they got big … and fat. I asked my mom once what he did with the rabbits after we gave them back. To her credit, she did not sugarcoat it. “He eats them.”

This is why they all eventually just became Whitey. I didn’t really understand what I was doing at the time, but I can see now it was my coping mechanism to believe that my pets were really all just the same animal, or maybe Whitey reincarnated again and again.

I had friends who also got pet rabbits from this man. Their mother told them that when they gave the rabbits back, he released them into the forest. I don’t think I would have believed this lie had my mother tried to pass it off on me. I’d rather know the truth, even if it hurts, than to live in a world fabricated for my protection.

Me and Whitey.

Note the extinct features in the background. They are called a "clothesline" and "gas tank"

(also known as the silver horsey).

Whitey was small enough to fit in my Easter basket when we first got him.

He would be much plumper when I said good-bye to him.

My sister's rabbit, and her rad sock.

The End of the World

I would hear the mournful wail of the siren and hold my breath, not moving a muscle, and listen intently to the sound. Would the whine of the siren fall after rising, and then rise and fall again? If so, then everything was okay. That was just a call for the volunteer fire department to respond to a fire or maybe an accident out on the highway.

If the siren rose and didn’t fall again but persisted in a steady, high fashion, I would have to mentally time it while scanning the horizon. Was it a summer day with dark clouds approaching? A tornado warning for our town meant the siren would blow continuously for a couple minutes before the whine quieted down and would be replaced by the roar of the oncoming storm. Recognizing this siren, too, would calm my fears. A tornado wasn’t a big deal in comparison. It was the third siren I dreaded hearing.

My grandpa was the Fire Chief in town, so I knew there was another siren that could sound. It would rise and then blow steadily, not for just a couple minutes, but for one hour straight. Or at least it was supposed to scream for one hour straight to sound the proper alarm, but I knew that if it ever happened, it would be silenced within a half hour, after the first nuclear bomb wiped it out. The siren I lived in fear of was the one that signaled war.

Yes, I was a child of the 80s. I know all about Flock of Seagulls haircuts and Rubik’s cubes and the Don Johnson white jacket. But what really defined the children of the 80s, in my opinion, is our living in fear of a nuclear holocaust.

It wasn’t just me who had this fear. I remember my sister and her friends about to leave the house one day (with their feathered hair and jean jackets, no doubt) while I was watching TV, and suddenly the show was interrupted by the Breaking News music and a stationary graphic. They all stopped dead in their tracks and waited to see what the news would be. Dan Rather came on and began saying something that I can no longer recall, but it was not a declaration of nuclear war. My sister made some excuse along the lines of, “I just had to stop because I love to listen to his voice,” and the other girls made up similar lame excuses. Nervous laughter floated through the air and then they were gone.

But we were all on edge, waiting to hear that President Reagan or perhaps the USSR’s Mikhail Gorbachev had pushed the fictional “red button” and begun the Armageddon. (Def Leppard’s Armageddon It, anyone?) At some point I had heard that it would only take 30 minutes for the first Soviet missile to reach the United States, so I would mentally tell myself that when the announcement finally came, whether via local emergency siren or Dan Rather, I would have a half hour left to live. I don’t know anymore what I planned to do with that half hour. Make sure my parents were home, I suppose. Or grab my cat and hide in the basement. Or maybe I was finally going to unleash my wild side and eat Pop Rocks while drinking Coke. There were a few buildings in our town that had those black and yellow signs with the triangles that indicated “Fallout Shelter”, but I don’t think I ever seriously planned to go to one of them. Watching other people’s hysteria would be worse than just dealing with my own.

Being a true child of the 80s, I framed this 30 minutes I had left to live by thinking of it as the time it takes to watch the Cosby Show. I remember once being at an outdoor theater watching a Shakespearean play and seeing planes fly over and wondering if it had started and none of us knew yet, because none of us were watching TV or listening to the radio and we were out in the countryside where the sound of the sirens might not reach us. I started picturing an episode of the Cosby Show, wondering how far I’d get through it before the blinding flash of light would signal the end, when my mom nudged me. “Look at that guy with his Walkman,” she whispered. “He must be listening to the Brewer game.” I immediately relaxed. He was piped in to the real world. If the war had started, he would know. I was safe. For now.

Come with me, Kitty, and I will protect you from the nuclear bombs! And that wallpaper.

A Fear of Flat Tires

Maybe I hear the “thwap thwap thwap” from loose concrete slabs under my vehicle. Or maybe it feels like my car is pulling to one side. Or for some reason the front left corner of the car seems as if it is riding lower than the rest of the car. Whatever it is that convinces me that I have a flat tire, I pull over to the nearest parking lot or even on the side of the Interstate if I worry the next exit is too far away. I jump out of my car and check each tire, sure that one of the rims will be twice as close to the ground as it should with the black rubber slumped against the pavement. But it’s not. I get back in my car and forget about it for a time or, if I feel particularly unnerved for some reason (maybe I’m alone and far from home), I’ll pull into a gas station and add a little more air to my tires. (But not too much. I was with a girlfriend once when she was pumping air into her bike’s tire and she overdid it, exploding the tire with a bang that reverberated through the whole town and nearly popped my eardrums and stopped my heart.)

My fear of flat tires didn’t begin until after I had my first flat tire. I was on the highway, not far from town, but suddenly the car made that telltale “whump whump whump” sound and was most definitely lower on one side. I pulled off the road immediately because I’d seen what can happen to cars that try to push it. A broken axle was not worth trying to make it to the closest business.

I was a freshman in college at the time and my boyfriend was in the car with me. We were coming home from a date, the details of which I can no longer recall. This was in the days before cell phones (yes, I’m that old), so we had no choice but to walk to the closest farm house.

After locking the doors to the car I’d borrowed from my parents, we walked a few yards to the driveway of a little brick ranch that looked exactly like the little brick ranch just next door to it. Fields stretched all around the houses, but we were not alone, as hundreds of cars kept screaming by us on the busy highway.

We walked past a sign in the yard protesting highway’s upcoming expansion into four lanes and rang the doorbell. After a brief wait, an old man answered the door. We explained the situation and he let us inside to use his phone. I called my dad and he said he would be right out to help us. Then we stood in the middle of the nice man’s living room and made small talk while we waited. The man lived there alone, but one of his relatives lived in the matching house next door. We told him who we were and who our older relatives were, and he said he knew my grandma. Everyone in town knows my grandma. She has lived there since she was a young girl and has always been a social butterfly. At the time of the flat she was still pretty active, checking in on her friends and dutifully delivering meals on wheels in town.

The only thing I remember about the inside of the man’s house is that there were two large, oval-framed pictures on the wall of his living room: one of Jesus and one of Mary. I told my boyfriend later that when I saw them I immediately relaxed, thinking that at least this stranger wasn’t going to kill us. My boyfriend told me he had the exact opposite thought.

We listened to the old man rant a while about the busy highway and his opposition to the four lanes. (Why he didn’t want more lanes to make the busy highway safer he was never able to express clearly. Something about how most of those people out there weren’t from town anyway, just passing through. I guess he thought they’d eventually go away? Also, I’m glad I was town folk.) Soon my father pulled up and helped us put the spare tire on and we thanked him and were off. Overall not that traumatic an experience, but certainly not a very comfortable one either.

The only other distinct memory I have of having a flat tire was in Orlando with my husband. We were still relatively newlyweds, and we were exploring the amusement parks together for the first time. We had just taken advantage of the profusion of restaurants available in this tourist mecca by eating at the Olive Garden, and then we left to go back to our hotel and get some sleep so we could get an early start at Epcot the next morning.  I was driving (again — is that a sign that I’m a bit of a control freak or that the person with me, who was the same in both stories, is a bit of a freeloader?) when I felt the distinctive lunge of the car to one side. The roads in Orlando were jam packed and all I could do was look around for the nearest side road so I could pull over. I found an exit off the main road, not really paying attention to what it was, and pulled over to the curb. Unfortunately it was a two lane road with no cushion on the sides, so we were basically blocking a lane. To make it worse, it was one of the entrances to all the Disney hotel properties. There was no hotel or driveway within sight, however, and my husband wouldn’t let me move the car at all for fear that we would do more damage, so we just got out of the car and I stood in the grass and tried to motion for people to go around us while he ran back to the nearest phone to call AAA. We got going relatively quickly and only spent part of our next morning at the local Walmart tire center instead of Epcot center.

There probably isn’t an ideal situation in which to get a flat tire, but the two that I have experienced have made me a bit jumpy on the whole subject. If any of you are in the market for a gift for me, one of those cans of air that can temporarily mend your flat tire until you get to the nearest gas station would be nice. And while you’re at it, I’d also like one of those seatbelt cutter/window hammer combination tools for escaping my car when it goes off a bridge. Come to think of it, maybe I should go back to biking.

Does my tire look flat to you? Maybe just a little?

Small Town Life

“I’m from a small town, too,” one of my coworkers in Nashville once claimed. He then went on to describe his hometown, which, even though I was not from Tennessee, I had heard of.

                “What’s the population there?” I asked him.

“Not even twenty thousand,” he answered with shame, as if he had just admitted to French kissing his cousin.

“My hometown has a population of twenty-five hundred,” I told him, as if to say, I’m sorry that you kissed your cousin but I’ve made out with my dog, so who’s worse now?

“You mean twenty-five thousand?” He wasn’t just going to concede his hilly-billy small town-ness to this out-of-state girl, but I couldn’t lie.

“No. Two thousand five hundred.” And then I added as a concession to make him feel better, “Actually it was twin cities and each of them had about the same population, so closer to five thousand, I guess.” (A.K.A. “I’ll bet your cousin was at least a good kisser, so there’s that.”)

Growing up in a small community, bordered on all sides by farms and not other suburbs, definitely gives you some different experiences than what “city kids” may have had growing up. Although I was considered a city kid myself, living right in town by the middle school and high school, even though there were still fields of corn and strawberries directly across the street from my house.

But we did not have the city activities that others had, whether that was visiting museums or sidestepping gangs at the park. Except for an escaped elephant and a murderous police officer, not much really happened in our town.

Yet, what did pass for excitement there was just as interesting as gazing at any Rembrandt or Renoir. I’ve gotten to see what happens when a cow wanders through a hole in the fence and is struck by a car (it falls down with its feet in the air and its muscles shake involuntarily as it expires). I’ve seen chickens beheaded and then flop around for a time afterward. (Dancing dead chickens is not something farmers make a practice of creating, because it dirties the chicken and gets the blood all over, but if you’ve got a guest, you have to give her a good show.) I’ve even seen things that do not involve the deaths of farm animals. Such as taking freshly butchered meat down to the basement of the farm house and grinding your own hamburger patties. I also have stories about farms that don’t involve dead animals.

Once, when I was quite young, I was running up a gravel driveway to the pig barn where my great uncle said they had a pig that was about ready to have babies. I tripped on the gravel and fell and bloodied my knee. As I sat there weeping and waiting for one of the adults to catch up to me, I noticed that in the grass beside me was a tiny newborn pig. This is how I learned that piglets can walk immediately after they’re born. We found one more outside the barn with its umbilical cord still attached, but the rest were sliding and slipping around the mama pig, searching for an open teat.

I’m taking the kids back to my hometown this weekend and to the family farm I visited when I was a kid. A cat there recently had kittens and my kids are eager to search for the newborns in the barn. Some consider where we live now to be the “countryside,” but I like to take them into the real countryside, where there’s not a business for miles and no Wi-Fi either. They will have their own farm-animal stories to someday tell their kids. Or to strangers on a blog.

(P.S. I’ve never owned a dog. Just so we’re clear.)

 A view of the back field and pasture on the farm.

 One of the kitties from last year.

One of the kitties from many years ago.

Magical Thinking and Other Mental Disorders

I remember the first time I started playing games in my head. At the time I just thought I was being a good student. I was probably in the first grade. One of my parents would drop me off out in front of school in the morning and then instead of going in the front door, I would walk all the way down the sidewalk past the school to the door that let me in from the playground side. My classroom was down at that end and my friends would be out on the playground until the bell rang to signal the start of the school day.

As I walked down the sidewalk by myself I would play a game of my own. I would think of a word I had to spell and tell myself I had to finish spelling it in my head before I reached the end of the building. I still remember walking across the sidewalk, saying a letter in my head for each square of pavement I crossed, and ending the word A-P-P-L-E just before passing the edge of the building.

It wasn’t long before this game morphed into one resulting in ridiculous anxiety. It’s an issue that still occasionally plagues me today.  Sometimes it works a lot like it did decades ago when I played it outside school, but sometimes it’s much different. For example, if I hear the garage door go up and I am headed from the kitchen to my office, I tell myself that I have to get off the wood floor and reach the carpet before my husband walks into the house or something bad will happen.

Fortunately, this kind of “magical thinking” isn’t a constant in my life. I like to vary my mental diseases: one week it’s magical thinking and the next it’s obsessive thoughts and then generalized anxiety followed by depression. I prefer a smorgasbord to ordering one meal off the menu.

I don’t think these habits are as “crazy” as they sound. While I am not a “checker” (someone who has to check that the doors are locked and lights are off and they end up clicking them open and closed and on and off to be extra-double-triple sure), I do check to make sure I have my money before I walk into a store. I check to make sure I have my tickets before going to a concert and then check a couple times to make sure they’re still where I think they are. This doesn’t seem overly strange to me. It’s just that some people’s habits get out of control.

I think in some ways, people who suffer from these types of maladies are more gifted than those who don’t. Not in that suffering is a gift, but in that they are gifted with an imagination that can picture the worst happening if these activities are not undertaken. I can vividly imagine the worst happening to my children when they drive off in a car with someone else, and it fills me with great anxiety and makes me want to avoid such a situation. I can imagine, in great detail, a slew of other unreal situations, both good and bad, and it can get me into a lot of trouble. My imagination always seems to be either much worse or much better than reality. But then again, while I can tell myself that things are never going to be as bad as I dread or as great as I hope, my imagination whispers to me that actually it will be worse than I could have dreamed and then works to conjure up that image.

Completely unrelated picture of Mackinac Island.
Because why not?

The only thing I can do with my overactive imagination is try to channel it to my benefit. Focus on fictional characters who can be depressed, and on whom I can wring out all my sadness. Imagine the worst happening to characters and then imagine how they can be saved. Concentrate on people and situations that don’t, never have, and never will exist, and let them have my anxiety. This is much easier said than done, however. Imaginary events focused on my real life and real people continue to intrude my thoughts. I’d explain more, but I have to go change the laundry before the phone rings or a meteor will hit my house.

For Karen

At this moment in a Catholic church in central Wisconsin, a family is holding a funeral for my best friend from first grade. To honor her memory, I’m devoting this week’s blog to her.

I remember Karen as a shy girl. She was quiet but friendly and kind. I remember the house she lived in before she moved away, and I remember playing with her every recess, as we pretended to be cats.

By second grade, she was gone. I had the address of where she moved to, but we never visited each other. We did, however, write each other letters. Her letters are still saved in a box somewhere in my parents’ house, along with class photos that she would send me each year. We wrote about what activities we were in and what classes we took, what our friends were like, and about the different adventures we got into. Having a friend who lived far away allowed me to open up to her and tell her things I had never told anyone else, such as the fact that I was still in love with a boyfriend who had broken up with me years ago. She was a safe outlet to vent to and I never had to worry that anyone would learn my secrets. I believe she found the same thing in me.

After we graduated high school, I went on to college and became busy with a multitude of new life experiences and had a hard time keeping up with friends I used to see every day. Karen and I didn’t write at all after high school. I never got to tell her that I found out that the boy I was still in love with was still in love with me, too. Today we have been married for 17 years and have two children.

I did find her a few years ago through Facebook. But as it is with people you haven’t seen for 30 years, you can peek in on each other’s lives but it’s hard to know what to say. We were quite different people now. From what I read on Facebook, she was a single, working woman who loved to talk sports and politics, and I am a stay-at-home mom whose two least favorite subjects are sports and politics. It wasn’t until I read her obituary that I found we still had a number of similarities, such as being cat people, enjoying trivia, and the fact that we both have angel collections.

Thank you, Karen, for being my friend. You helped make my passage through childhood a little bit easier. I hope I did the same for you. I wish you peace.