Commentary : You Worry About the Real Dangers, and He’ll Sweat the Small Stuff
It’s nice to have reached an age when one is no longer afraid of the big things, such as the H-bomb or pulmonary cancer (said he, stubbing out a Camel and lighting another). They may do me in, but they don’t frighten me.
Little things do.
One day, for example, an Orange County newspaper ran a blithe photo spread of a small child playfully enclosing himself in a large cardboard carton. This set me trembling; large cartons scare me so much that I would swerve into head-on traffic to avoid hitting one. I can’t forget another newspaper story, long since yellowed, about a teamster who thought it would be fun to flatten an empty carton with his truck. It wasn’t empty, and the trucker will carry that horrid surprise to his grave.
Motorcyclists who travel between car lanes scare me stiff. People open their car doors in traffic for a lot of reasons: To change drivers, to see what’s holding things up, to expectorate. When they do, the biker goes right in. I had a theoretical fear of this for a long time, and then saw it happen on Brookhurst Street.
I’ve no eccentric fear of wildlife, except when some naturalist advises folk to gather up weeds and eat them. (This is usually accompanied by the offer of a recipe book for $12.95.) At least a half-dozen toxic weeds are native to Orange County, some deadly, and most people are not botanists. Our poisonous greens include wild tobacco, castor beans, poison oak and hemlock--which looks temptingly like wild celery.
I have trouble forgetting a San Gabriel matron who went foraging and stewed up a nice batch of wild tobacco for her family--not one of whom was alive the next morning.
I quail at the sight of a hammock. A friend of mine went through life with an empty sleeve because of one. He fell out of a hammock and broke his arm when he was 11; the ground bacilli got into the fracture somehow, and doctors couldn’t save the arm. This was a freak injury and hardly a cause for general alarm. But I would not get into a hammock if Raquel Welch was inviting me to share it.
More profoundly, I’m scared by peepholes in front doors. These tiny glass apertures, often attached to pressable bars that play chimes, are standard fixtures in this Age of Security. But if I look into one, fear will kill me. This phobia dates from my days as a cub reporter in San Francisco, and an event that was curious even in that curious city:
Police kicked in a locked apartment door and tripped over a corpse in the vestibule. There were no signs of violence. The man appeared to have died peacefully, of natural causes. Then a coroner’s aide noticed a slight discoloration of the right eyelid, and the victim was found to be the victim of an ingenious gangland hit.
The killer had rung the doorbell, placed a .22-caliber pistol at the peephole, waited for the victim’s eye to darken it and fired once. Thirty-seven years later, the nicest youngster raps at my front door, offers to drill an observation hole in it (at greatly reduced cost) and wonders why I am rude to him.
I am afraid of chain saws and have 27 stitches to show why, but so are most people.
More privately I’m terrified by those sharp-edged, steel lift gates anchored to the rear of trucks. You see them everywhere, and they’re safe enough when folded upward. But extended to the rear at the level of the truck bed they are like giant knives. I saw one get rear-ended by a compact car a few years ago on the San Gabriel River Freeway near Katella Avenue; it guillotined the compact and four people inside.
If all this sounds morbid, it is meant to be the opposite. People don’t have to worry about lift gates, hammocks, weeds, pasteboard boxes and interstitial bikers. I do all the worrying the world needs.
This leaves others free to worry about gang crime, taxes and insider trading, foreigners, fiber intake, acquired immune deficiency syndrome, rotten TV and the President’s health. These are worthwhile current phobias. If I don’t fret about them, it’s because I have my own worries.
Readers may be heartened to know that some long-held fears can vanish in an instant. Decades ago, when planes had propellers, I flew for the Navy but had severe doubts that I could ever bail out of a disabled aircraft.
Then one day I watched a Grumman fighter enter the pattern trailing smoke. The pilot had room to jump but tried to land. He was flamingly unsuccessful. My fear of parachuting disappeared at that moment.
