| September'99 | . |
This Journal |
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The other night, I think it was Thursday, I was doing my usual twelve around the track and the sun was going down. I must have been about halfway done. Off in the distance but not too far away, I heard a whistle and a man calling as if to bring back a dog. I heard a bit of barking dog noise, then nothing. Maybe this dog was just running free after a day of being cooped up in the house while his guy was off at work making money or something. Maybe he just needed some room to run, and there was plenty of that back over under the high tension lines. It's a wide swath of land chopped out for these lines, separating the school's athletic fields from recent housing developments over to the east. Lots of room for a dog to run. Well, that could be and probably was the situation. Nothing happened. But as I was running round and round the track another scenario played itself out in my brain. This was a mean dog, broken away from its owner. It had heard or smelled me running over here. It was coming to get me. I noticed that the tall fence to the power lines was open right there at the end of the track. I pictured this wild dog, fangs bared, racing toward me with blood in his eye. I pictured me freezing. Then I thought, no, better move somehow. Maybe I could jump the low track fence just as the dog was jumping it, then the dog would have to jump again, and I would jump again, etcetera, until we both collapsed. No, the dog would follow a straighter course right to my throat. So I'd better look for something to pick up as a weapon, a stick or something, but there's nothing. The track has been tidied up. I'd have to do what I did before in Joliet when that german shepherd came at me. I froze, pulled in my arms, and yelled "Stop". That dog flew by, grazing my hand as I retracted it. It turned back at me, making mean doggy noises, but didn't come at me right away. The owner caught up and took control, apologized and asked if I was alright. I checked my hand - some dog slobber but no broken skin. That was maybe five or six years ago. But it became part of my wild surmise the other night while I ran my regular pace around the track. To see me you'd think I was just another bored jogger. But inside, for a minute or two, I was a scared little kid again. My long-term, utterly irrational fear of dogs has been a part of family legend forever. I won't detail the humiliations here. I pretty much grew out of it by my early twenties. People tried to trace it back to some mythical moment when a big doggy jumped up on my baby stroller. People tried to teach me. (Mrs. Oldani across the street would bring Tarzie over and show me how harmless she was. And, of course, Tarzie was harmless; but I was having none of it.) People had tried to psyche me out. (I've been told I have a mildly phobic personality - whatever the hell that is. I've been asked about early fears of insecurity and abandonment - sure, let's blame it on the folks.) In truth, however, none of this helpfulness was able to touch the cold black thing that rose up within me when I sensed Dog Nearby. The only thing that seems to have made a difference was my fear of embarassment as I grew. I just got too old to let myself freak out around dogs. What would people think? I sucked it in and got through it. Eventually a few dogs became family members. Maybe it was just a lack of familiarity all along, not knowing dogs. Whatever. Dog fear was the biggest, but there have been others. Sometimes it seems that I get rid of one particular fear here and another pops up over there. So the issue is not dogs, or storms, or bridges, or air travel. The issue is Fear, which has a life of its own down in some less evolved chunk of the brain. We've all got it; Hollywood tries to tap it. Hitchcock knew how we love to feel terror under very safe conditions; thus, Psycho and rollercoasters. The world is a fearful place. A child's irrational fears might be soothed to a point by caring, reasonable adults. But what can they say to a kid who knows that some guy with a gun can show up in school or church or home or anywhere? At what point do childish fears just become the real world? Contrary to my fear, I was able to grow into a world of (mostly) friendly dogs, of pretty good weather forcasting, a scientific bridge-guilding and statistically harmless flight. But what about these kids who know so early that the world can go wild at any moment? I don't got no answer. |
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Joseph Conrad |
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