Yesterday a couple of pictures popped up in my Facebook feed that made me shudder just a little . . . took me straight back to my childhood . . . the weird things my dad used to do.
I believe I've mentioned that I have an irrational fear of the dark. It's really not as bad as it used to be . . . for a lot of reasons . . . mostly because I'm older now, have a healthy belief in God, and discovered that most of my fears are really unfounded.
Not that bad things never happened to me . . .
. . . but . . .
. . . I'm 54 and still around to tell the tales . . . so there's that!
When we, my sister and I, were kids, Dad told us tales for entertainment purposes, but also to keep us sort of in line! That fiddler crab story a few days ago . . . fiddler crabs were . . .
. . . well, let me start at the beginning.
My Grandmother Hahn lived on the Savannah River when I was a tiny tot. Since it was close to the ocean, the river would rise and fall with the tides: low ocean tides meant that the river would be reduced to not much more than a deep stream, half the width of the river. What that meant was that on both sides of the stream was deep, sticky, mud. Those fiddler crabs live in the mud, and when the tide goes out, you can see air bubbles rise above where the crabs bury themselves . . . almost as if something really freaky lurks just below the surface . . . if you didn't know about the crabs.
To keep us unsupervised kids away from the mud . . . dangerous, sticky, mucky mud that would suck a small child down . . . holding it until the tide rose . . . resulting in drowning . . . my dad told us there were "hooligans" living in the mud. Hooligans . . . with horns . . . bloody red eyes . . . giant teeth so sharp they could shred skin . . . lived in the mud . . . their breathing was what caused the mud to bubble up. Terrifying images were stuck in my head . . . became even worse when he drew a picture of one:
Looking back, it seems we were allowed to wander a lot of places unsupervised . . . it was a different time . . . nobody worried much about their kids. And as a general rule, we were pretty aware of our surroundings . . . had lots of other kids with us . . . so if someone got hurt or in trouble, there was usually another kid to run for help! So, at Grandmother's, we had run of the property. We'd creep ever so quietly to the riverbank at low tide . . . to see if we could spot one of those freaky hooligans. My heart would pound . . . palms sweaty . . . fear coursing through my blood . . . exit strategy mapped out ahead of time. No doubt, should one of those monsters break the surface, I would have beat feet back to the house, jumped into bed under the covers, leaving all the other kids to fend for themselves.
Thankfully we never saw a hooligan . . . were never sucked down into the mud . . . never drowned in the rising tidewaters. I wonder today about alligators though. Dad never mentioned alligators. Maybe they didn't hang out in that area . . . who knows.
I did share that story with your mom and Auntie E when they were little girls, and they obviously survived into adulthood! Guess the warning was a good one.
In addition to the hooligan though, there were lots of other "warnings" in my life; these two pictures my dad painted hung in our houses for years . . . in our BATHROOM no less . . . so we had to look at them every morning and every night while brushing our teeth!
Yep . . . warped . . . it's the only way I can describe my childhood . . . well, that and terrifying!
"If you carry your childhood with you, you never become old." ~ Tom Stoppard
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