the Four Freshman :: It’s a Blue World
We were squealing and giggling in her girlhood room. We were playing, I think, with dolls. Maybe the subject of our pretending got more serious; maybe one of the Barbie moms was fleeing, with her babies, from the police. Maybe teen Barbie was pathologically lonely and admitting it to a Ken that was too old for her. But that’s adult projection. There was no reason for us to feel what we felt next, none in the world. Except quite suddenly, she and I were stricken with that thing—that special childhood terror. You know what I’m talking about. Such a surge that the wallpaper crawls, you hear doors opening and closing everywhere, you hear the panting of somebody, anybody sinister, just outside the door.
I think this feeling is unique to childhood. Adults do not experience fear that way. When we do experience something so abject and meaningless, we call it a panic attack and medicate ourselves accordingly. Being scared that way, for grown folks, means something is profoundly wrong. But kids, they weather that feeling. I mean, all of us remember that shaking, begging fear from nowhere, coming upon us in our childhood beds. That moment when we’re walking home from school and everything is dully, dumbly normal… then suddenly we’re off—running like hell. We look, to adults, like we’re in the midst of some youthful exhilaration, but the truth is we are being chased by something in us, of us, something real that doesn’t quite make sense yet.
The night with the dolls, we couldn’t tamp down the terror. We huddled in her bed with all the lights on, first, then all the lights off, second, so that no one from outside could see where we were lying, awake and vulnerable. We listened to groaning in the walls for what seemed like hours (and might have been). It sounded like human whimpering (and might have been). After much urgent whispering we decided, finally, that our situation was ridiculous. We had to calm ourselves. And our answer was a CD, one of her Dad’s, with a song she liked. A song that promised to be sweet and relaxing.
Of course it took a good bit of pep-talking to convince ourselves it was a good idea to leave the safety of her bed to get the CD. But in the end, we did it together. We found the disc, put the song on repeat, and threw ourselves, breathless, back underneath the covers. It was this song. It drowned out the wall-noises and the breath of imagined killers. It was still on when we woke up the next bright morning to her Mom asking us, “what in the world?”
It’s a Blue World (5.6MB MP3)
the Four Freshman
I still get that paralyzing fear sometimes. not so much or as intensely as I used to of course, but I’ll still get out the old samurai sword and place it under my pillow and practice my hard kicking until I fall asleep.
oh, and domenic, if you’re reading this, I have your samurai sword.