Fear Is the Root of All Evil

I’ve started keeping a sort of diary that includes my childhood and extends into my life as an adult.  The piece of writing below is something I am working on that involves my earliest recollection of fear.  It’s way too lengthy to include the whole thing in this post, so instead I just took the first part of it and figured that maybe I could add on to it in future posts.

Childhood Fear

I had a dream..

I was trapped in the arms of a gigantic octopus.  It hovered in the air above a crowd of people and I looked down from its snare, paralyzed with dread.  I was as afraid of the monstrous beast as I was ashamed of my predicament in ending up like this: embarrassed to be separated from everyone else, and wondering how and why this was happening.  My grandfather, who was among the crowd below, looked up and pointed at me, and with a concerned voice he called out to me, telling me not to move. 

..Then I woke up.

It was 1969, at the peak of the Vietnam War and the free love counterculture.  The world was rioting and psychedelic drugs were everywhere.  The sexual revolution was in full swing and chaos ruled the earth.  And in the midst of the hippie movement and campus uprisings I was fighting my own internal battle, unbeknownst to my parents or anyone around me.  I started becoming aware of a presence in my midst that had seemed to attach itself to me like a shadow.  It felt as if I was sharing my space with something; as if I was constantly being watched or followed.  I didn’t like the way I felt and yet I wasn’t aware that there was any other way to feel.  I assumed very early on that this experience was normal and I thought that everyone must feel the same way because I didn’t know any differently.  I tried to ignore it.  But no matter where I went or what I did or who was with me at any given time, this presence clung to the very core of me.  In fact, at times I assumed that it was me.

In many ways I was a typical two-year-old.  I see proof of that in old photographs where I am playing dress up in strings of pearls and my mother’s sunglasses or being read to by my father or sorting through my Tinkertoys on the living room floor.  I was quite average on the surface.  The only child in the family at that point, I was given every ounce of love and affection that two parents could possibly provide.  I suppose one could surmise that I lacked nothing.

Though much of the world then was following the dictate of Timothy Leary who said to “turn on, tune in, and drop out,” my mother went to great lengths to see to it that our family was shielded from any form of 1960’s deviance.  Instead she built her home around her Roman Catholic faith and her wholesome, 1950’s moral influence and conservative conformity.  Her aversion to the freewheeling, footloose and fancy-free attitude that pervaded society in those days was demonstrated in several ways from the music she played (and refused to play) to the clothes she wore (and refused to wear.)  My father followed suit, and between the two of them not a drop of radical 60’s spillover descended upon our home, aside from the inescapable drab colors of the era: pea green, mustard yellow and burnt orange.  From clothing to furniture to wall paper, those colors were the popular flavor of the 60’s, and they dominated the marketplace the way weeds dominate an unattended garden.

My father worked most days, and often late into the evenings.  He ran a gift and home furnishings retail business with his father, and combined they had seven stores from New York to Connecticut.  They stocked everything in their stores from decorative knick-knacks to wall hangings to furniture.  They even had a picture framing section where they stored and chopped lengths of moulding so that customers could bring their posters or prints to have them custom framed.  The store always smelled like a combination of burlap, sawdust and wicker.  My mother was a homemaker, having quit her job in 1967 after she found out she was pregnant with me.  She was totally in her element as a full-time mother and enjoyed keeping house and spending time with me.

My earliest memories are of our first home, which was an old coach house that my parents rented in Syracuse, NY, on a street called Dorothy Street.  It was in a neighborhood which was a cross between suburbia and inner city; a tired little street lined with a bunch of tired little houses.  The neighborhood kids were all older than I, loud and fun, and I made friends with most of them.  I can remember one day when they were all gathered round on someone’s front porch, playing with a toy known as the Footsie.  It was a plastic toy that had a hard yellow loop that you put around your ankle which was connected to a thin green tube which was connected to a pink bell-shaped object.  I watched in awe as they each took turns skipping over the pink object and twirling it around and around with one foot, making jump rope type movements.  I wanted to take a turn but my mother told me that I was too little and that the game was meant for the bigger kids.  It frustrated me because I didn’t understand how a toy with such bright, pretty colors could be off limits.  Nevertheless, I was always included in the fun and games, even if just as a spectator, and my mother stood by with a watchful eye.  She rarely left my side.

After my sister Amy’s birth we moved forty minutes away from Syracuse to a house out in the country in a town called Marcellus.  It was during our stay in this country home that I first remember being afraid.  I wasn’t even three yet, and I began to have very intense feelings of fear and dread.

Photo by: berkielynn

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