Tag: life

Fear of Heights: It’s Partly Biology 

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You could say I’m terrified of heights, but they’re just the delivery system. What I really fear is the rapid, involuntary reunion with the ground. 

I’ve tried multiple variations of that unfunny joke through the years, because I want something to say when the questions, the teasing, and the antagonism starts. The best thing to say in these moments is something, because I’ve tried saying nothing, and it doesn’t work. I also need answers to the internal dilemma I experience when I encounter those who fear just about everything but heights. What’s different about me? If I had an actual phobia, an acrophobia, I wouldn’t be able to climb ladders, go on roller coasters, or zipline through a forest. I found an answer that states that I’m not in the five to ten percent of those who suffer from some form of acrophobia, but I fit within a broader, non-phobic category of twenty-eight percent who suffer from something called a visual height intolerance (VHI). This isn’t the answer I was searching for, but it is an answer.  

Even with that answer, those of us who suffer from VHI don’t understand why we have an irrational, emotional reaction to heights that frail, little old ladies and young teenagers don’t. It makes no sense to us that we struggle to stand atop a twenty-foot ladder and jump into a thirty-foot void tied to a zipline, and other people don’t. 

As our group of eleven made our way through the various ziplines, we got to know one another in superficial ways, and we learned that some of us are doofuses, but even our doofus demographic weren’t as scared as I was. They were having fun. I wanted to believe they were too dumb to know how much danger they were in, but when the people who were more intelligent than me screamed with glee on their turn, the only answer left for me was that I was a fraidycat.  

If you’re an awful, offensive person, you probably attract offensively awful people as friends, and if you don’t have answers for them, they’ll hit you with every mean-spirited, funny joke they know. I also have nice friends, but their sad, sympathetic looks hit deeper than my friends’ jokes, and I tell unfunny jokes to keep those looks off me. No matter which side of the fence they’re on, I suspect that most people enjoy tasting another’s vulnerability so much that they can’t hide their sympathetic, concerned smiles. I know this because that’s how I react to their vulnerabilities.  

“You didn’t like the zipline? Because I thought it was fun!” they say. It’s humbling, embarrassing, and frustrating to be this scared of something that people who make no sense enjoy. We can drop our “C’mons!” on them, but after we algorithm their answers, we find that they genuinely enjoy ziplining. I realize I have no answers for that, other than I’m just scared. I’m scared of something that frail, little old women and teenagers aren’t. The idea that the zipline experience didn’t rattle the teenagers, in particular, really got to me, because I was the one who helped them get over their irrational fears. “Monsters don’t exist,” “Most bugs aren’t as big as your fingernail,” and “You can take control of your nightmares in a way that will prevent them from being as scary.” I taught them that if they are able to rationalize the irrational, they might not fear it as much. I helped them conquer their worst fears in life, and they’re the ones now giving me sympathetic, concerned smiles. 

But I Did It!

One of the answers I have for why I fear ziplining so much is that the plot of most of the nightmares I’ve had since I was a little kid involved being high up on something, looking down, then falling off (or stepping off) a platform into nothingness. We now call this ziplining.   

I did it though! Before we continue, I want it noted that I managed to separate myself from what researchers call a clinical case of acrophobia to one who suffers from what they call a visual height intolerance (VHI). Those with a clinical case, the roughly five to ten percent, would’ve never been able to step off that platform into nothingness secured to nothing more than a line with three reinforced nylon ropes. I did it. I braved my worst fears, and I tweaked those (to me, crippling) fears by ziplining through a forest. I jumped off five different ledges and zoomed 30 feet above the ground from tree to tree. It was one of the greatest accomplishments of my life, and that’s not hyperbole for me. I know that’s sad, but it’s sad but true.

Now, how many of my most beloved and loyal members of my friends and family do you think joined me in the celebration of my accomplishment of conquering what I considered the most terrifying experiences of my life? If you guessed zero, you are correct. I didn’t really need anyone to congratulate me, because when I finally touched ground, I experienced what Irvine Welsh wrote about in his 1993 novel Trainspotting “doing heroine [is] like having 10,000 orgasms at once”, except I would replace “doing heroine” with ziplining. I didn’t need anyone to intensify my reaction to completing the course, in other words, but when they asked me: “Are you going to do it again?” my disgust broke out: 

“Who gives a crap! Right now?” I said. “We’re not even a minute away from me conquering my greatest fear in life, and you’re asking me if I’m going to do it again? Why don’t we take a minute to celebrate what I just did.”  

I enjoy being human don’t get me wrong, and I’m not going to switch species based on one petty grievance, but why do we insist on asking someone if they have the skill, temerity, and resolve to accomplish something great, momentous, and unprecedented again? Why do we insist on doing it right after they did it? They don’t let us savor our accomplishment for one minute. When we graduate high school, which was an incredibly arduous accomplishment for me, the first question was, “So, where are you going to college?” When we receive a promotion, they ask, “Is this a stepping stone, or are you going to fly higher?” Who gives a crap about that now, right now? Right now, I think you should say, “‘Holy Larry!’ You did it!” The key to my frustration, if you haven’t guessed is the “right now” portion of this ubiquitous exercise, the present tense, as in just minutes away from our grand accomplishment. We can get around to all the other stuff when we get around to it, but for now, help me celebrate this accomplishment.   

In the history of Super Bowls, there have been a little over 3,000 NFL players who have reached the pinnacle of winning a ring. As evidenced by the idiotic and obnoxious sideline reporters, we don’t want to let those elite athletes celebrate their enormous accomplishment for five minutes, as these reporters ask the star of the game, immediately after the game, ‘Do you think you can do it again next year?’ The player responds, “I’m just going to celebrate this one for a while.” Rather than focus on the incredible athletic achievement these fifty-three players, coaches, and the team’s hierarchy just accomplished, we want to know if they think they’re going to be able to win it all again next year. I want one of these players to look at these reporters with disgust and say, “Do you want to know what it took from us to get to this point? Do you have any idea what it takes to win what might be the most difficult and prestigious trophies in our country? Do you want to know anything about the sacrifices the fifty-three players on our roster made to make this happen?” I want this NFL player to add, “All those hours you spent watching Netflix, going to parties, and sitting around watching sunsets, I was in the weight room, in dark film rooms, and in grueling two-a-days, and doing it over and over again all year, and that’s not even accounting for everything we did in past years to get to this point. We haven’t had a drop of alcohol or smoked anything all year. I haven’t had a slice of cheese in three years. And we did it all for this moment, so could you, maybe, just give me a moment to celebrate what it took me and only about 3,000 other men to accomplish in life?” 

I understand that some anonymous boob ziplining 30 feet off the ground doesn’t even come close to winning a Super Bowl, but conquering my crippling fear felt just as momentous in the moment. When I reached the final platform, and it was over, truly over, I felt an adrenaline rush that informed me that I could do anything I wanted to in life. When that adrenaline washed out of my system, I softened my stance a little, because I realized that my friends and family couldn’t understand how huge that moment was for me, but I added that it would’ve been nice if they asked me to try to explain it to them before asking me if I was brave enough to do it again.    

I’ll admit that I likely won’t do what was one of the most terrifying experiences of my life ever again (insert your small smile of schadenfreude and sympathy here), but why does that matter? Correction, maybe it should matter at some point in the future, let’s say the one or two years from now when we talk about ziplining again. For now though, right now, let’s just let me celebrate my crowning achievement for a moment. Let’s just take a second and realize how hard this was for me, and let’s celebrate the fact that I did it all with a dry throat and quivering legs.  

When they ask, “Are you going to do it again?” they usually follow our ‘no!’ with, “Really? Because I didn’t think it was that big of a big deal. It was 30 feet off the ground. That’s considered a minor to low-medium elevation zipline experience.”  

Our ziplining experience was probably equivalent to a kiddie slope in skiing, and all people and companies that offer ziplining experiences know to go over the top with safety measures to make sure their customer base feels secure. This involves being secured in at three different points and various other procedures the employees require their customers to go through. Our lives were never on the line, in other words, but that’s all rational and reasonable. Those who suffer visual height intolerance (VHI) and a clinical case of acrophobia know that a fear of heights is irrational, unreasonable, emotional, and now we know that it’s partly psychological too.  

Partly

If you missed the key word of that last sentence, go back and reread it and focus on the third to last word of that last sentence partly, for therein lies an answer.  

The research states that the majority of my fear of heights is mental/ psychological, but there are physical elements involved too. That’s right, I found an answer to why some frail, little old ladies who fear things that go bump in the night, and teenagers who still have some remnants of fear of the boogieman haunting their dreams don’t experience crippling fear on a zipline’s platform, and I do. If you’re an acrophobic or one who suffers from VHI, and you don’t have an answer, you might not consider this a quality answer, but I’m okay with that, because like fear in general, the quality of answers are relative to the person.  

Research has concluded that some brains are just different. That’s not a mind-blowing revelation, I know, but it opens up the idea that some brains, be they in the little old lady or teen demographic, adjust well to heights. Others don’t, and the fear that others experience might feel psychological, but its roots are partly physical too — and those roots vary from person to person. At certain heights, an individual’s balance system, their proprioception, or equilibrium, becomes less stable.  

The sensory‑motor system (vision, vestibular organs, proprioception) of the acrophobic and VHI sufferer generates stronger instability signals at heights. The brain’s balance system—its ability to sense its position, movement, and force without relying on visual input, enabling balance coordination, and precise motor control—becomes less stable at varying heights. Some brains interpret that instability as danger; others don’t. It all depends on which side of that divide you fall. When visual cues are far away, those with a condition can’t use them to stabilize posture, so sway increases. Some people’s brains treat that sway as a threat, triggering fear. Others feel the same physical shift but don’t interpret it as danger. Put simply, some brains handle visual–vestibular mismatches smoothly; others become unstable and anxious. If the acrophobic and VHI person experienced frightening experiences, or they dreamt them up, they may have incidentally linked instability with danger. Others don’t make the same associations. The individual who doesn’t fear heights isn’t braver or made of a stronger constitution, their body just doesn’t send “danger” signals at heights, and their brain won’t amplify those signals.

We do it to ourselves, in other words. Some of us may have experienced real life incidents that forever shaped our reaction to heights, but most of us train our overly creative brain to react to heights in such a manner. If we have always imagined the worst, and/or experienced decades of nightmares where heights played a main character, our trained brain will not handle vestibular mismatches smoothly, and our body won’t stabilize posture very well when visual cues are so far away. As I wrote, sufferers might not consider that answer an epiphany, and it might not prevent the pack of wolves, we call friends, from whipping out their measuring sticks to prove superiority, but it is an answer.  

It’s also an adequate answer to the question, “If you received such an adrenaline rush from tweaking your fear, why wouldn’t you want to do it again?” Adrenaline rushes are short term fixes. They’re not the answer, as we will be just as afraid next time as we were this time, because the portion of our brain that regulates proprioception, or equilibrium, when we’re high up is still going to be a little off.  

My final word to those who suffer from these varying levels of fear when they’re high up is, there is something wrong with you, but it’s not what you think. You’re not a coward, a fraidycat, or a wimp. Your brain is just a little tiny bit off, and in the grand list of physical, psychological, and mental disorders this might be the one everyone would pick if they were forced to pick one at birth.

So, the next time someone calls you chicken, a wuss, or a fraidycat, you can now say, “Well, it’s partly that, but it also has something to do with my overly active sensory-motor system cranking out premium-grade instability signals the moment I achieve altitude. My brain simply refuses to handle visual-vestibular mismatches with any dignity whatsoever.

“And yes, it’s mildly embarrassing, as I’ve never actually plummeted from anything noteworthy. After mining the scientific research put into the study of me and my 22-28% brethren, the best answer I found is that I did this to myself. My overly creative brain has changed me into a certified neural drama queen who instantly routes even ‘minor sway’ into the ‘instability equals instant doom’ shortcut anytime I achieve at least twenty feet of altitude.

“You, on the other hand, haven’t trained your brain to broadcast or amplify overly theatrical danger signals. Congratulations, you calm biological member of the majority, but you’re not necessarily braver or composed of a stronger constitution, your hardware just isn’t quite as hysterically talented as mine.”

I’m not afraid of spiders, snakes, enclosed spaces, injections, germs, thunder and lightning, dogs, flying, or flying dogs, but I do have one highly irrational and emotional fear related to my visual‑vestibular conflict. When I started my research, I wanted to find that we have some gene variant or some sort of genetic clue involving the inner ear that helps us regulate balance. I wanted to be able to say that my condition was directly related to genetics, so I could blame someone or something else. The best answer I found is that modern scientific research finds that my system is likely over‑responsive to height‑related visual‑vestibular mismatch — something that can be influenced by genetics, but also by experience, conditioning, and neural wiring. I wanted something I could drop on my family members and obnoxious friends, but there’s no conclusive, proven casual links. I wanted to find satisfying clarity, but every study kept coming back to the idea that an overwhelming majority of my problem is all my fault, and the same level of creativity I use to write on this site is the culprit fueling my greatest fear. It’s an answer, but it’s not a very satisfying one.

Getting Older, Older, Old!

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“Now that you’ve seen the whole package,” standup comedian Eddie Pepitone said shortly after walking on stage, “I want to answer the question that you’re all thinking, and the answer is yes, I have had a lot of work done. I’ve had my hair removed and my belly let out, because I was too pretty.” –Eddie Pepitone.  

“Age is a relative concept,” is a phrase we’ve all heard, but what’s the difference between old and old. Ruth was seventy-eight years young, and I don’t describe her age that way to sound culturally sensitive. Ruth was happy, and she loved being alive every day in every way. Most seventy-eight-year-olds, like Jack, don’t. Jack was just tired by the time he reached seventy-eight. I don’t know what he was like before, but the guy I knew would’ve been much happier if he died sooner. Ruth had an infectious smile, and watching her work her way through her day could leave one feeling exhausted. Jack lingered long after he stopped mattering, or caring about matters. Age is a relative concept.

***

We don’t know where we’ll be at age seventy-eight, but we experience indicators along the way. We don’t think about age now, but Jack might say that’s because we’re not seventy-eight, broken down, and just tired. I’ve never tried to act or look younger than I am, and I’ve never lied about my age. I just am who I am, a little older and wiser, but I never really thought about age, until my long-time friend walked into the bar and grille wearing a pair of Crocs. 

Tony Mancuso was all about girls when he was young. He loved them big, tall, short, and small. He was so girl crazy that everything he did in life was to get more girls looking at him. We all did that to some degree, but Tony went further than anyone I knew at the time. Another girl crazy friend, an Aaron, started Tony down this road when he said, “You have it all, great hair, a great personality, and a decent fashion sense. The only thing holding you back,” Aaron said, “is your skin.”  

“What’s a fella supposed to do about their skin?” I asked. “We can grow our hair out, cut it short, buy new clothes, all that, but we can’t do anything about our skin.” I said that with empathy, because I, like Tony, had bad skin. We both had acne pockmarks and scars, holdovers from the severe case we had as teens. 

“Some of the times a fella needs to hear what he needs to hear,” Tony replied.  

“That’s true,” I said, “but what can you do about it?” He shrugged, I shrugged, and the matter sort of devolved into nothingness.  

About a week later, Aaron and Tony found an answer to what I considered an unnecessarily harsh insult, and Tony was willing to sacrifice his good standing in our ultra-male community by applying a little bit of Aaron’s Max Factor Pan-Cake foundation makeup to help cover those unsightly pockmarks and scars. Then, when a little dab didn’t do him, he overdid it. He had a line under his chin he didn’t blend, because he didn’t know he was supposed to blend, so his little sister had to teach him. It didn’t embarrass Tony, because he thought it would all be worth it in the end. Aaron and Tony then began turning their collars up, they stopped wearing hats, and Tony began shaving more often and brushing his teeth on a daily basis, because he knew girls liked that. He was all about marketability and increasing his market share in our teenage dating market. Tony eventually escaped the raging insecurities that drove him to do such things, but seeing him again, after years of separation, in a pair of Crocs, led me to the inescapable notion that we were both old now.

We have an idealized image of ourselves that we see when we’re talking to others, and mirrors don’t reveal the incremental progressions from those delusions. We’re in front of a mirror every day, so we don’t see the aging process, how much weight we’re putting on, or how much hair we’re losing in them. Pictures used to tell those tales, as we could compare them to pictures of us from our past. When we started using our cell phones to take selfies every day, they failed to tell the tale of monthly and yearly progressions. In the age of technological advances, we can live in total denial, until we run into big, glaring signposts that reveal irrefutable facts to us. 

Tony didn’t show up for our reunion dressed in one of those Hawaiian shirts that appear to be issued at the Florida state border, and he wasn’t wearing khaki shorts. No, the man who almost appeared to have a fashion consultant in our previous life together, rocked my whole world by walking up to the table of the bar and grill in a pair of Crocs. 

“Are those Crocs?” I asked him with a level of disdain that I didn’t conceal very well. 

“They’re comfortable,” Tony said.  

‘Holy Crud, we’re old!’ I thought when I realized Tony Mancuso was now choosing comfort over fashion. It had been probably ten years since I last saw him, maybe more, and the transformation between the man I basically grew up around and the man standing before me now were nearly 180 degrees different. If I wore something for comfort, back in the day, he would’ve said, “That’s fine, but you look like an idiot.” If we saw a grown man in a pair of sandals, he would’ve dropped his pat response on the man, “The last man to look cool in a pair of sandals was Jesus of Nazareth.” Now, that man, was basically wearing a pair of them.  

When we’re happily married for as long as Tony and I were, the idea of dating someone else is as far from our purview as free-solo rock climbing. When we’re happily married, we usually hang around other happily married people who haven’t talked about dating for over a decade, and when we don’t talk about such matters, we don’t see those windows closing. We know it in the larger sense, but it feels like those windows are closing, in the present tense, as opposed to closed or slammed shut forevermore. 

When we’re happily married, the idea that our waitress, barista, or whatever service industry employee stands behind the counter, is cute, beautiful, or incredibly attractive, catches our eye. “That never leaves a fella,” my eightysomething uncle once told me. “I don’t care how old you are, or how married you are, it never leaves.” Yet, there is a huge difference between someone catching our eye and rocking our world.  

I now choose to think that the act of admiring a beautiful young woman as equivalent to admiring an artistic masterpiece, the only difference is God and/or mother nature is her Creator and/or creator. My examination of her features is an appreciation of the result of features that have emerged from thousands of genetic variants interacting with each other and the environment. If I walk through an art gallery, and I see a beautiful work of art, I’m going to stop and look, and I might admire it for a spell, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to make any commitments to buying it.  

I don’t know if the waitress who stepped up to take our drink orders that day was that artistic masterpiece, or if I had the effects of Tony’s Crocs swimming around in my head, coupled with the idea that those shoes meant our dating lives were “so over” that the whole situation enhanced her beauty to me. Whatever the case was, I accidentally, incidentally, or situationally leered at her.  

And she didn’t care. She didn’t appear the least bit complimented or disgusted by my faux pas. She appeared so unmoved by it that I felt smaller and more insignificant than I would have if she called me out on it. This has led me to advise beautiful, young women that if you can effectively ignore a leer, as effectively as this waitress did to me, you might make this guy feel so irrelevant that he never leers at another woman again.  

Yet, that leer wasn’t the desperate cry from a lonely well it was when I was younger. When this young, beautiful, and muscularly athletic woman whose features emerged from thousands of genetic variants interacting with each other and the environment generated an almost automatic hedonic and motivational response in me, I think I just wanted to drown out the whispers I was hearing from Tony’s Crocs.   

When we left the bar and grille that night, Tony stood, key in hand, near a 2019 Ford Fiesta, while we talked. He almost acted as if he was going to get in the Fiesta, and I grew distracted by the joke I saw coming as he stood there. The joke involved him nearing the car, as we spoke of other matters, and at the last second, just before we parted, he would pull that key back and say “Gotcha!” He’d then walk over to his 1970 Plymouth Hemi ‘Cuda. I still had that expectant smile on my face when he said, “All right, I gotta get going,” and he fobbed his Fiesta.   

“Is that yours?” I asked. He said it was. “Is it a rental?” I wondered, thinking maybe he got into a car accident or something.  

“No, it’s mine,” he said. Again, Tony’s whole life, or the life I knew him in, was all about ‘what will the ladies think?’ Now, he’s pitching a car to me based on the idea that “It gets excellent gas mileage” and “The 2019 Ford Fiesta was deemed one of the most reliable and durable cars of the year, with excellent points in terms of drivability.” I didn’t question his research, because my yeah-buts were all about how a man who used to drive late 70s gas hogs that fired up and appeared to run on testosterone and sensitive androgen receptors could now be driving a sensible sedan that all but puttered when he turned the key in the ignition. 

***

Seeing pictures of myself told me some undeniable truths, playing sports against teenagers told me something else, but that day at the bar and grill was so illustrative that I found it slightly and temporarily depressing. Tony Mancuso was my fella for so many years that he felt like my brother from another mother, and seeing him age gracefully and accept the facts of the aging process was so shocking that I didn’t want to talk about it. I expected to suffix his age with years young, as opposed to years old. I expected him to dress like a man on the make, even though he was a happily married man who no longer needed to appear attractive. Seeing that this man who is six months younger than me, either give up entirely or display how comfortable and happy he was in life, caused me a couple sleepless nights.  

‘Nobody is looking at us anymore,’ was my takeaway, ‘and Tony realized this before I did.’ When we were teens, Tony would ask me if his hair looked right, and “What do you think of this shirt?” My pat response to him was to tell him that fewer people were looking than he imagined. Seeing him in a pair of Crocs while driving off in a Ford Fiesta led me to the depressing conclusion that he finally accepted the fact that I was right.   

I never expected to write anything about age insecurity, because I’m more at peace with myself than I’ve ever been. I answer that age old question, “Would you like to go back and do it all over again?” with an asterisk, “If I could go back with my current mindset and everything else as is, I’d love to go back and edit and totally rewrite elements of my life, but I wouldn’t want to go through everything that accompanies youth again. I wouldn’t want to undo all of the psychological and philosophical progress I’ve made just to physically relive my past.  

I’ve also found most of the elements of aging quite pleasing. We’re all insecure to some degree, but insecurities were such an insurmountable obstacle when I was younger that I’m glad most of that is over. I love being a husband, father, and family man so much that I rarely, if ever, think about other things, until they smack me in the face like a signpost.

Mr. Q is Quiet 

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I couldn’t put my finger on it, when one of my friends threw me a beach ball, but I felt something, something that I needed to explore. I’m not one who searches for such things, but some of the times they find us. The texture of that beach ball felt so unusual that I looked down at it. It was fresh out of the package, and I thought the reason I never noticed the texture of a beach ball before was that I never handled one fresh out of the package before. I threw the ball to my friends without thinking too much about it. When it finally made its way back around to me, I caught it near my face. I accidentally caught a huge whiff of the beach ball, and that unique scent put me back, somewhere. I couldn’t put my finger on it when I put my finger on it.

The beach ball also felt naughty to scrunch, and I wasn’t sure if I enjoyed the sound of the scrunching or the feel of it, but I knew I wanted to keep doing it. 

“What are you doing, throw it,” my friends yelled. I knew scrunching was weird, and I knew if I kept doing it, they’d start talking. “You think he’s normal? I once saw him scrunch a beach ball for about two minutes straight with a look on his face that I’ll never forget. That boy ain’t right.” I saw those impressions starting to form on the faces of my good friends, and I knew I should’ve snapped out of it, but I just couldn’t stop searching for the connection.

“C’mon, throw it!” my friends finally shouted from the pool, snapping me out of it.

I probably should’ve obsessed over it for a little longer, when it was fresh in the mind, but I didn’t. I decided to return to the normal and enjoy the rest of my day at the pool, because I learned it does no good to press and obsess over issues like these, because when they’re gone they’re just gone. Trying to retrieve them is basically pointless. I don’t know how long it took me, decades at least, to remember that this unusual connection I had with the material of a beach ball harkened back to the days I first met The Letter People.

***

“We’re not to touch The Letter People!” our real teacher, a Mrs. Chamberlain, informed us when she introduced us to the first Letter Person we met, a Mr. M. “We’re going to learn a lot about The Letter People throughout the year, and we’re going to learn a lot from them. They will become our friends, but we are not to touch them!” I didn’t know what Mr. M had going on, or what this was all about, but I was all into it.

By the time Mrs. Chamberlain introduced us to the second character, a Mr. T, I recognized the developing routine. We were going to meet a new character at regular intervals, but I couldn’t figure out how regular. The second introduction wasn’t as overwhelming as the first, but I found so much comfort in this routine that I no longer cried when my mother left me to the charge of Mrs. Chamberlain.

By the time we moved past those introductory characters, I began to move past the idea that they were teaching tools, and I began to think The Letter People visited us from another land, a Middle Earth of sorts, similar to the land J.R.R. Tolkien later introduced me to in The Hobbit. 

I’ve never been great at waiting, but it’s been reported that I was horrible at it before I learned how to tell time. After teaching me that my mom taught me how to mark the passage of time with ‘X’s on calendar, so I wouldn’t bother her so much about how many days away my expected days were. When I began anticipating the day of arrival of the next Letter Person in the same miserable manner I did other hallowed days, my mom had a word with Mrs. Chamberlain, and we found out that Mondays were the new hallowed days in my life, and I would ‘X’ my way to Mondays.

I eagerly anticipated the day of introduction for each Letter Person, but to be quite honest most of them didn’t have the star power, the it factor, that Mr. M and Mr. T had. I realized, on some level, that the rest of them were just learning tools for kindergarten kids who needed to learn the various uses of the alphabet in our language. I might overestimate how advanced I was in kindergarten, but my mom was such an active parent that most of what my kindergarten peers were learning for the first time was retread for me. Whatever the case was, I was a little bored by the routine of The Letter People for a time, as the routine of school sapped some of their magic in the months that followed, until I met Mr. Q.

***

I still remember the day I met Mr. Q for the first time. He stood on the right side of the entrance with our new substitute teacher, a Miss Landow, as she stood in her usual spot welcoming us to class for the day. “We’re not to touch Mr. Q,” she reminded me, as she seemed to sense that I was going to try to establish a greater connection with him. I obeyed, but I no longer viewed Miss Landow as a host, greeting us for the day. I viewed her as a sentry obstructing our ability to form a complete sensorial connection with him, and I resented her for it. 

Mr. Q felt rarely used, mostly ignored, and an underdog who is often misunderstood. Mr. Q felt like an avant-garde phoneme, before I knew what avant-garde and phoneme meant. He wasn’t the last Letter Person I met, and I don’t know if I knew all this, or sensed it, but I remember feeling a special connection to Mr. Q based on the subtle idea that no one else connected to him the way they did the other Letter People. 

Mr. Q was quiet. His special feature/superpower was silence. As my mother could surely attest, I never considered being quiet before, and I never met anyone who operated in silence before I met Mr. Q. The concept was so foreign to me that I decided to try it out.

“What’s wrong?” my mom asked me. “You’re so quiet.” I don’t remember if that question validated my new existence, if it emboldened me to pursue the idea of silence, or if I thought I was really onto something, but I loved the power of silence in those moments.  

As opposed to the other Letter People, Mr. Q silently observed the people, places and things around him, and when he did eventually speak, it proved powerful. I never heard the word philosophical, much less philosophical concept, but I found this idea of operating on an entirely different plane than everyone else intoxicating. I focused on the idea that just because everyone was talking, it didn’t mean I had to add my two cents. Some of the times, I imagined Mr. Q saying, there’s more power in silence. I found that cryptic and mysterious, even a little ironic, and possibly unstable.  

***

I’ve had an unusual, almost spiritual connection to “something different” for so long that until I remembered my association with Mr. Q, I didn’t think it had a point of origin. It doesn’t matter what genre it is in music, movies, or books, if it falls under the heading “something different”, I’ll at least give it a crack, probably develop a crush, if the author successfully manages the tightrope between developing something organically different and writing something that is different for the sake of being different, I’ll probably fall madly in love. My obsession with something different may have started before The Letter People, but I don’t remember that far back. I only remember that knowing that when I was going to new Letter Person, it made the idea that I could no longer spend every waking hour with my mom a little easier. I actually looked forward to going to school just to meet these new characters.

I tried to get to know more about them than anyone else did, to increase my level of familiarity, but there wasn’t more to know. Knowing this made me feel so limited. There’s nothing to figure out about blowup dolls, and I know that now, but as a six-year-old kid these mysterious figures called out to me. They wanted to get to know me as much as I wanted to get to know them. Our kindergarten, class photo showed all the students and teachers saying cheese and smiling for the camera, but I was smiling at The Letter People near me.

Beagles have ways of making foreign objects talk to them. They sniff and sometimes inhale them so deeply that they end up sneezing twelve times in a row. When their powerful sense of smell doesn’t help them understand a foreign object any better, they try eating it, urinating on it, or attempting to procreate with it. When dogs fail to arrive at some form of greater understanding of its purpose, they move on (Jack Russell Terriers and Beagles excepted). Their motto is “Try, try and try again, and then move on. No sense making a fool out of yourself.” I was not/am not wired that way. My obsessive brain does not let things go, for better and worse, and I obsessed over these mysterious figures called The Letter People.

When I couldn’t further my individual definition of the essence of these Letter People from afar, I wanted to touch them and play with them to learn everything I could about them. I wanted to be their friends and spend time with them to get to know them better, but we couldn’t touch them.

As nice and sweet as Mrs. Chamberlain was, her, “They’re not toys, and we’re not to touch them” carried some weight with us. She either had an authoritative way about her, or her beauty and demeanor granted her authority. I write the latter in association with psychological studies that suggest kids, even as young as five and six, behave better when their teacher is young and beautiful, because they want to be her. Mrs. Chamberlain had those qualities, and she spoke in an ethereal tone that reminded us of Glenda the Good Witch. Whatever the case was, when Mrs. Chamberlain laid down the law, we listened.

My guess is that Miss Chamberlain and the school administrators developed their “No touching” rule based on precedent, because kindergarten kids can’t stop. Again, my memory serves me well, because it reminds me that I was far more intelligent than my peers, and I was so bored that I ventured out, and my guess is they probably developed their “No touching” rule for kids like me who couldn’t stop. Yet, depriving me of the sense of touch only elevated the mystique of these characters, as I realized I would need to find other ways to learn more about them.

By the time we met Mr. F, Mrs. Chamberlain was no longer our teacher. She got pregnant, and I didn’t know what that meant, but I learned that being pregnant meant she was going to be gone for the rest of the year.

“Does that mean she’ll be gone for a while?” I asked my mom through tears.

“No, she’ll probably be gone for the rest of the year,” my mom said, and I assume she used more compassionate words to try to somehow soften the crushing blow for me.

A Miss Landow stepped in her place, and Miss Landow was a less attractive, more authoritative woman. Miss Landow informed us that Mrs. Chamberlain’s “No touching” rule for The Letter People would be upheld, and she meant that in no uncertain terms. Miss Landow, however, did not have the leadership mystique Mrs. Chamberlain did. 

I don’t know if this happened on Miss Landow’s first day on the job, or first week, but Tommy Spenceri decided to challenge her edict. Either that, or he didn’t have the patience I did to work through his progressions. Whatever the case was, Tommy could no longer abide by the “No touching” policy when we met Mr. F, and his floppy feet. He rushed to the front of the classroom to employ what a defensive tackle in football would call a bull rush, and he knocked Mr. F off his floppy feet. He hit Mr. F square, drove him onto his back and popped him. Nobody screamed that I remember, but I was on the verge of it. Tommy ruined Mr. F before I got to know the man, and Tommy deprived me of developing whatever relationship I might have developed with Mr. F. 

Tommy Spenceri was six, I know what that means now, but back then I considered his flagrant violation of protocol so horrendous that I couldn’t look at Tommy without disdain for his inability to restrain his primal impulses. When Mr. F returned, the next day, his hole was taped to help him retain air pressure, but I couldn’t look at him, because he appeared weak to me, tainted as it were, and I had no respect for him. It’s a bit callous I know, but how many six-year-olds know anything about the complex emotion of sympathy?

The one thing that Tommy’s impulsive act taught me was the concept of moderation. I was never going to commit what I considered a flagrant violation of protocol as horrendous as he did, but with Mrs. Chamberlain gone, her leadership mystique went with her, and to my six-year-old mind, that opened a window of opportunity. I don’t remember the exact timeline involved here, but at some point I conspired with my younger brother, a heist of a Letter Person. I wasn’t sure which Letter Person I would steal, or if I would steal all of them. I had favorites, but I didn’t want to play favorites. I didn’t want to leave a man behind, so my plan broadened out to stealing two of them, to three, to however many I could grab. I was not the type of kid who stole things, and I considered the whole idea shocking. I also knew how shocked and disappointed my authority figures and my mom would be if I was caught. Yet, I was so obsessed The Letter People that it grew into something some might characterize as unhealthy, even for a kindergarten-aged child.

I was disappointed that Miss Landow, and the powers that be, didn’t punish Tommy as severely as I thought they should’ve. They gave him what they called a “stern talking to”. Tommy violated the sanctity of The Letter People, and their primary “no touching” rule, and all they gave him was a “stern talking to”? Tommy maintained his smug smile throughout this “stern talking to”, and I watched it all thinking that they weren’t do enough to protect The Letter People.

When I began plotting and planning this heist, my perspective on Tommy’s soft punishment changed. I now realized that if they caught me, they might give me nothing more than a “stern talking to”.

While in the planning stages, I realized that I didn’t know where The Letter People went after our week with them was over, and I decided to start watching the routines of Miss Landow in the coming week to see what she did with The Letter People when our lesson plan concluded. I don’t remember how sophisticated my plans were, but I knew that when people stole things in the movies, it often ended in gunfire. I also knew that the thieves who survived the gunfire went to jail. As much as I wanted to spend more time with The Letter People, and become better friends with them as a result, I wasn’t sure if I was ready for gun play, but I knew I wouldn’t do well in jail. I tried to live without my mom once, when ran away from home, and that worked out so poorly that friends and family talked about it for years after. Everyone considered it so funny that I couldn’t get to the end of the block without her, and I found it humiliating to realize I wasn’t able to exist on my own. 

With that fantasy out of sight and out of mind, I moderated further. I developed a foolproof plan based on the patterns and behaviors I watched the various players in our school for the next couple of days. When we went to recess and played on the playground for however long it took, Miss Landow stayed with us, monitoring and observing us. On the rare occasion someone had to use the restroom, she allowed them to go inside the school, unmonitored and unaccompanied, to use the facilities. Once I mustered up the courage, and that took some time, I asked to be excused from recess.

The path to the restroom and our classroom were the same, until we hit a fork in the hall, turn right and we’re headed to the open-doored classroom. Turn left, and we’re headed to the bathroom. I thought about this in the planning stages, and I followed my plan to the letter. After asking her if I could go to the restroom, I approached the fork in the hall as casually as I did any other time I went to the restroom, and I turned left to the restroom. I stood on that corner and looked back at Miss Landow. I could see her through a window in the door, talking to a fellow teacher and laughing about something. I carefully looked in every direction, and then I held my breath and crossed the hall and entered into our kindergarten classroom. 

I felt a “whoosh” of emotion when I crossed that threshold, as it was my first experience with committing something so wrong it felt right. I looked back down the hall and up the hall to see if anyone witnessed my transgression. The coast was clear. My immediate thought was to initiate plan A and steal Mr. Q, but I couldn’t think of a way to conceal him well enough to sneak him out the door. Years later, I wondered why I didn’t just deflate him and hide him in my shirt, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t know Mr. Q was inflated back then.

When I finally stood before Mr. Q, I didn’t know what to do. My plan B did not include any details of what I should do when I was finally alone with him, because I didn’t think I’d make it that far. I didn’t want to tackle him, or hurt him in the brutish manner Tommy Spenceri did. I just wanted to touch him little, and I did. It felt a little naughty, but it felt cathartic and pleasing in an almost spiritual manner to run my fingers across him. Then, I touched him so much that I began squeezing him softly, and when I did it made a scrunching sound that I enjoyed. I scrunched him a little more, and then I lowered to a knee and sniffed him, and Mr. Q’s scent was so unique and pleasing that I neared him even more and inhaled that smell deeply.

For most people, memories of childhood are relative. Some remember a few snapshots from high school, some go back further, but very very few can remember anything beyond sixth grade. This moment I spent with Mr. Q felt so special that I would recall it, decades later, when I held a beach ball for far so long for my friends gave me a look that suggested I was doing something worth remembering. I also remember that I would continue to use the restroom excuse to visit the other Letter People we met after Mr. Q, onto the final days with Mr. Z, but my sensorial and physical relationship with Mr. Q, who I knew would remain quiet about our interaction, was the most special.

When the class photo day arrived at the end of the school year, Miss Landow brought back some of the old Letter People we met to stand in that photo. While every other student, Miss Landow, and an assistant teacher said cheese for the camera, I smiled at the Letter People. Thanks to my regular “restroom” visits I thought I knew them, and their essence, better than anyone else in the class. 

Years later, my brother discovered that there was an actual The Letter People television show. I was stunned and shocked, and I don’t know how I verified it, or if I just took my brother’s word for it, but I had to see that show. The problem was that show aired when I was in school, and my brother was so young that he was able to watch that show, and I wasn’t. That destroyed me a little, because I thought he might be developing a better relationship with them than the one I had. I was so bitter and angry that I told him to stop telling me about the episodes. I eventually saw this show, and I don’t remember if it occurred in the first episode I saw, or soon thereafter, but my interest waned quickly. I was too young to know that someone wrote and directed these episodes, and I knew nothing about voice actors, or any of the players involved in such a production, but I thought they did it wrong, all wrong.

“There’s no way Mr. T talks like that,” I, a budding critic, told my brother. I also complained about the various interactions of these characters in whatever six-year-old verbiage and understanding of the world I had at the time. I thought almost all of the characters were wrong, or different than what I imagined. It wouldn’t be the last time a production left me feeling disillusioned, but when my brother later urged me to watch another episode with him, I told him I wouldn’t be watching it again. Watching the Letter People interact could’ve and probably should’ve ruined all the mystiques I built for them in my personal interactions with them, but it didn’t because I thought I knew them on a level no one else did. I thought I knew them on a level that could critique what others thought they knew. My guess was that those who created that show didn’t know who the Letter People were, what they cared about, and how they interacted with people in real life.

When I finally made the connection between Mr. Q and the feel and smell of that beach ball, the totality of the connection, as it pertained to my story and the “something different” elements that have defined me, didn’t immediately strike me. There wasn’t a “whoosh!” of understanding that overcame me, but I had an answer. The connection did remind me what an incredibly fun imagination I once had as kid. My immediate thought was “Holy crap, I wish I could go back to that. That was so fun.” I basically created this world where I lived with intimate knowledge of The Letter People, and that led me to think about all of the other worlds I created for my comfort and amusement. Those worlds felt so real to me back then that they were actually kind of embarrassing to talk about for decades after, because I went so far overboard. I stretched my imagination into realms that caused the smiles of my listeners to fade, because most people consider exaggerations a little concerning and/or weird. They also immediately react with a harmless insult such as, “I’m going to guess you didn’t have a lot of friends, non-imaginary friends.” It’s funny, of course, but it’s also not true. I had a lot of friends, imaginary and real. 

The final thing that struck me was as enjoyable as reliving those memories proved to be that fun, almost artistic imagination of childhood is pretty much gone now. I did wish I could go back to having that imagination that was so incredible that it was almost embarrassing to talk about, but I also know that there is always a tradeoff. So, even if I were to find a bottle with a genie in it, I wouldn’t trade my current scientific and mathematical understandings of the ways of universe with the incredibly creative one I had as a kid, because as wonderful and beautiful as the childish imagination could be, it also comes equipped with the confusion and fears of the unknown that can be just as powerful and scary, and when we’re huffing on a beach ball remembering the former, with such a huge smile that it can cause a tear to form, sometimes we forget the latter.