Scary Guys

Vake is now old enough to articulate why he doesn’t like Santa:  “He’s a scary guy!” 

     I can remember only one fear as a pre-schooler, and that was doh-dohs.  I have no idea what a doh-doh was, but Diane Goodman was already six years old, and she told me they were under my bed. I believed it, even when I looked under the bed and didn’t see anything under there, except for dust bunnies.

      My life was rich with fantastical creatures, but they didn’t scare me:  The wolf who threatened Little Red Riding Hood, the wolf who threatened the Three Little Pigs, and the troll under the bridge who threatened the Three Billy Goats Gruff. The Devil was interesting, but he was really just a red-colored image on the label of a can of ham.

     Fear came when I was a little older.  When I was about six years old (1953) there was a kidnapping in the news, and I was afraid of kidnappers until Mom assured me that kidnappers only stole the children of rich families, and we weren’t rich.

     I was more concerned about witches. There were interesting, but not scary witches like Witch Hazel in the “Little Lulu” comic books, who never seemed to catch Lulu when she went into the bushes to pick beeble berries. But that witch in “The Wizard of Oz”? Now, she was malevolent! She threw fire balls at the Scarecrow! And her flying monkeys have traumatized certain children for life.

     Jon, Dean, and Patty scared me by telling me that an unlighted bathroom was “the spooky room.” It was located in a house on a small hilltop in Florence where the adults took turn watching the skies, and telephoning calls to Portland whenever an airplane passed over, a civil defense effort.  To me, the bathroom was scarier than the threat of enemy air invasion. 

     The day I turned seven years old, I was staying with the Hakonen family, because Mom was in the hospital giving birth to my brother Mark.  We made a trip that day to Jantzen Park in Portland, OR, where I was horrified by walking through the “fun house,” where skeletons in lighted niches would move when I passed.

     With time, the fears subsided.  I was still fascinated by skeletons, so some time after Dad buried our pet cat that had been hit by a car, I tried to dig it up, but I never did find it.  My art work at the time was full of both skeletons, and bug-eyed monsters. Later, I learned that they were such a common occurrence in Sci-Fi that they were referred to simply as “BEMs.” As soon as I could read, I also discovered the Yeti (in “Popular Science,” no less), the Loch Ness Monster, and eventually, in our own back yard, the Sasquatch.

     The current scare monsters are Vampires and Zombies.  They don’t interest me—but when Jerry insisted that Brook and I watch a movie with him, we saw “Zombies.” And when our hero was seated in a stall on the toilet, a clown popped under the door, and Brook screamed! And I have to admit, the movie is funny.

     The ultimate scary guys are UFOs, but Steven Spielberg took much of the scare out of them when he published “ET” and his extra-terrestrial was simply charming and sympathetic.

      My husband Jerry spent more than a decade of his life at a part of the Nevada Test Site popularly called “Area 51.”  He’s very terse about talking about it.  “You know, there are reasons for place like that,” he says. Ask him about Roswell, NM--  he subscribes to the weather balloon theory.  Still, even he has a fascination in looking into a deep black sky. He is quick to spot the international space station, just after the sun goes down, but when its rays can still illuminate a body high in the sky. He is quick to spot military satellites, moving in polar orbits. But he admits that there was a time, when he was in the desert, looking into the deep, dark sky, when he and the other aeronautical engineers with him, saw something that moved in an anomalous east-to-west orbit. They all saw it. The religious among them began praying, and the agnostics said “I’m not seeing this!” Jerry agreed: “It ain’t one of ours!”