Fearful Five-Year-Old

I have been requested to write about my childhood, but I think I might disappoint. I lived a charmed childhood with two parents, an older brother who sometimes took it upon himself to torture me using all five of my senses but for the most part was always there to watch cartoons, build forts, or tell really funny stories. I lived in a great neighborhood where there were loads of children around my age. It was pretty simple.

So simple, in fact, that when I sat down to think about the vivid memories, I seem to have catagorized them into emotions or feelings. Today, FEAR is the winner.

Turns out, I was a very fearful child but I was the only one who knew it. Maybe my parents knew it with the repeated visits to our door at bedtime to make sure I had locked it, over and over and over. Maybe they knew it when they found me hiding underneath their bed when they were watching a werewolf movie on the television. But, I think they knew it every Friday night when the family gathered in our basement where our only television was located and the terrifying Incredible Hulk played. I sat on our couch along with Sean, my brother, knowing that at any moment Dr. David Bruce Banner might get angry and turn into that terrible green thing.

I would always ask my dad, "Do you think he is angry?"

No one ever told me when the good doctor was getting angry and I was too little to actually follow the storyline so I waited in fear to see the first tear of the pants and the first red in his eyes. I would beat it out of the family room around the corner where I could hear the television but could not see it.

I would yell back into the room, "Is he done?" I have memories of Sean telling me it was all over and I would wander back in and see The Hulk throwing cars and bending light poles! He'd laugh and I would return to my refuge behind the wall and wait. Why would I put myself through this each week? The alternative was just as scary...sitting upstairs by myself as everyone else watched The Hulk!