Thursday, October 22, 2009
Group Blog Thursday: Are You Afraid?
Heights don't really bother me. I'm not a fan of snakes, but the kind that can kill me in one bite aren't really indigenous to Anaheim, California. Ever since I was a kid, spiders have freaked me out so bad that I can rarely force myself near enough to kill them, and that creeped-out feeling only intensified a few years ago when my now dearly-departed paternal grandmother was bitten by a brown recluse spider and had to have her leg amputated.
As I was thinking about this topic, though, I thought about my many phobias (life-like dolls, reflections, disembodied voices) and I just felt like those weren't really what I fear. Yes, yes, I know all you word-scholar types are screaming at your computer screens right now that "phobia" means "fear" but just go with me on this.
The one thing I really, truly fear is being completely helpless and vulnerable.
I experienced this in almost paralyzing fashion one night as a missionary in Mascouche, Québec. It was not long after the night Sister Angel and I saw the faceless and under dressed stranger in the road.
It was a Sunday night in early February. As part of our Sunday evening festivities, we made goals for the week and had what was called "Companionship Inventory" where you talk about the things that are going well and what can be improved on. It's actually very helpful when people are being honest and nice about it.
Anyways, we had some extra time while we waited for Elder Young, our twenty-year-old District Leader to call and get our report of the previous week's activities. So we sang a few hymns. We were right in the middle of a roof-raising rendition of "Count Your Blessings" when I stopped cold and listened.
(I should take a moment here to mention a couple of important facts about the house we lived in. One, it was out in the country. We lived in a spacious apartment built onto the back of a mansion, and our sliding glass door opened onto a wooden porch with ten steps going down to where we parked our car. That sliding door faced north, and past the porch, there was a huge, open field that ended in a line of fairly dense maple trees. Two, our immediate next-door neighbor was a Jewish abbatoir. Creepy, right? Three, the neighbor on the other side of the abbatoir was some guy that raised sled dogs. Very noisy sled dogs that always knew what time dinner was.)
Okay, so I stopped singing because I could hear the dogs. They were going CRAZY. I had never heard them bark like that, even at mealtimes. And since it was already a bit past 9pm, I knew it wasn't dinner time.
A strange feeling of panic washed over me and I suddenly said to Sister Angel, "Did you lock the sliding door?" It was an unusual question because I knew perfectly well she hadn't. We never locked that door. We lived in the country. Before she could answer, I jumped to my feet and ran across the cold wooden floor to the door and flipped the lock, which wouldn't budge. The door wasn't closed all the way. Sister Angel was beside me in half a second and together we shoved the door and lock into place, took one look at each other and dashed upstairs to the bedroom.
We sat on our beds and tried to decide what to do. And we scared each other with the "possibilities" of what could be lurking out there in the darkness. Our apartment was like a fishbowl. We had no curtains. In fact, the only room with a window covering was in our bedroom, and that was only because the sun rose so early in the mornings.
The phone rang.
We crept down the stairs and I made Sis. Angel answer it because I didn't want to talk to Elder Young. He and I didn't get along so well. I sat on the stairs while she answered the phone in french, said a few words and then hung up.
"It was a wrong number!" she practically screamed.
"That's what happens in horror movies!" I responded. I just knew an animal head was going to come crashing through the door at any moment, but I stayed where I was.
Sister Angel walked over to the wall and shut off the lights, then crossed the room to a window that faced the empty field. She stifled a scream as she cried, "Footprints!"
Sure enough, there were very determined footprints in the snow. They led from the back of the abbatoir right to our porch and out of sight. We both sank to the floor and I experienced the first official panic attack of my entire life.
The phone rang.
Sister Angel crawled across the floor to answer.
I'm skipping a few minor and boring details here, but essentially Elder Young ended up chatting with Sister Angel for a few minutes about how unlikely it was that some crazy axe-wielding psychopath was lurking outside our door waiting for the right moment to come in an chop us to pieces.
She finally hung up the phone and after spending another half hour or so sitting on the floor beneath the window, we started up the stairs, knowing perfectly well we weren't getting any sleep that night.
She suggested calling the landlord, but it was late and he had a baby, and apparently my genius mind was more content with facing certain death than with waking a sleeping child.
The phone rang.
Sister Angel told me I had to answer it this time.
I took a breath and answered the phone. It was a missionary that lived up the street and he had this feeling something wasn't right, so he decided to call and check on us. I told him what was happening and he said that if the escaped mental patient hadn't tried to get in yet, he probably had moved on and we didn't need to worry. I got off the phone and dashed upstairs.
Neither of us could sleep. Every sound was amplified in the perfect quiet you find on a snowy winter night in the country. And then a snowplow started up next door. For nearly two hours, we sat at the window and watched the plow go back and forth across the abbatoir parking lot and wondered if the man at the wheel was responsible for the footprints.
At some point, we both drifted to sleep and woke up a few hours later to the sounds of someone on the roof.
It was broad daylight and it didn't take long to realize it was the landlord breaking up the snow and ice to keep the roof from collapsing. I decided to run out and tell him about the prowler.
**********
Me: (squinting into the sun as I looked up to the roof) Hey, I think someone was out here last night.
Landlord: Well, I was.
Me: (pointing at the footprints) Are those are YOUR footprints?
Landlord: Yeah. The abbatoir asked me to go check things out at night. Walk around the building and whatnot. Hope I didn't cause any problems.
Me: Nope. No problems.
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"You know what they say. If you don't have anything nice to say about anybody, come sit by me."
~Clairee Belcher, Steel Magnolias