The Queen of Sheba

It's dog days of summer so I thought that perhaps I ought to focus on writing about summer topics. Forget stories about adventures in skiing and ice skating. (Wrote that just to cool you off.)

Worms. There's a summer topic for you. Though hardly the point of today's essay.

I spent the first 11 years of my life first in Naval housing and then in project-like apartment complexes. And what most of those places had in common in the 50's and 60's were kids. Lots of them.

While I cannot pin point when I realized I was an odd child out (okay, I can but that's a story for another time), it became super clear sometime after I moved into Parkway Terrace at age five, a brick-faced set of apartments that were probably 1940s era. One of the things I discovered after a while (attending school also helped in this discovery) is that children can be mean, particularly in a group. And though they can definitely be mean to each other, they seem to take extra delight in hurting things that are new to or different from them. And in their hive mind mentality they can be fascinated by difference and open to the suggestion to squash it. (Yes, indeed, The Lord of the Flies reflected my internal experience of children in groups.)


For me, watching children poke and squash bugs in a heartless manner and egg each other on in their life denying exploits totally freaked me out, as if worms or other bugs had no place in life. (Guess you could say I identified.) Where was the love they had for puppies and all things cute?

Like some with Asperger's, I took it upon myself to school first me and then them in one of my interests: kindness. The challenge for me was: how to do that.

Saying things like "The worm's harmless. It's not hurting you. Don't kill it." went unnoticed to hive mind mentality that would take over and made me decidedly more unpopular. A stick in the mud. A target for ridicule. Or worse, a target for all things scary to be tossed upon.

Ah... my fear of having scary things stuck in my face or being chased about by a bug or rodent wielding child made me realize that other children were as weirded out by and afraid of the non-cute or unfamiliar as I was. THIS fear must be the source of the hive mind desire to squash what is different. THAT fear became my challenge, which is not to say, I had any desire to get over my fear so that one day I'd be able to tolerate having nasty looking bugs thrown upon my being.

Perhaps the tendency to feel heartless about difference and have the need to squash if it's born out of fear of other ought to be one key to whether someone has actually grown up when they mature in age. (To squash for reasons other than fear may be a good way to spot someone with anti-social personality disorder or a psychopath.) But... I digress.

What I took from this realization is that it was my job to appear unafraid. This was not easy. I was raised by a mother who is deathly afraid of bugs, and sometimes I think the fear is either genetic or pathogenic in some way, passed along in the womb.

Appearing unafraid seemed to me to be the only way to avoid frogs in the face. And while I was not the least bit afraid of frogs or toads (I actually love little toads), I was afraid of anything thrust in my face with the intent to frighten. The desire to scare or harm another was and is infinitely scarier to me than any alien creature I might stumble upon.

Of course, that--appearing unfazed by attempts to frighten me--alone did not stop the frog in the face routine. To stop that, I had to over come my fear of the not so cute and different. That is, get a reputation for bravery. And as anyone who's earned that sort of reputation knows: being brave does not mean you are not afraid or even getting over your fear. It means taking life-affirming action in spite of your fear.

One of the ways I acted in spite of my fear was by picking up a worm that was being prodded and poked by a small cluster of children and place it in my hand. Then, I'd speak of the wonders of the little worm (not realizing that this probably only made me even more the odd child out). I showed my lack of fear of spiders (so totally not true) by rescuing Daddy Long Legs (which we know are not really spiders) from imminent torture.

Worms, as it turned out, were not really all that creepy. Nor were snakes. I discovered that some alien creatures were down right interesting and even, dare I say it, fun. They added to what I labeled "good" around me. And to my surprise, the more I acted as if I were not afraid the more unafraid I became.

Given my mother's fear, she probably wondered who had given birth to this child.

Despite the children and their seeming fascination with torturing all things different, I loved living in Parkway Terrace. The apartment complex was surrounded by woods with streams and blackberry canes and rusted out old cars. (Back in the day when Suitland, Maryland, which was a pre-traffic ten-minute drive from Washington, D.C., was still relatively rural.) All the stuff that makes for kid adventure. That is, if you are raised in or butted up against the country, as we had been when I lived in Naval housing.

Also, we had hard wood floors, high ceilings, casement windows, windows in bathrooms, and cross breezes; we could look out both the front and back of our buildings from the inside of our individual apartments. A feature that I would soon learn was about to disappear from newer apartment construction and get me thinking about interior design. There's a reason that air conditioning is an absolute must in apartment living. (And perhaps the availability of air conditioning--something the tenant would pay for--led to more "efficient" apartment design. That is, economically efficient for real estate developers.)

Our building, was a part of three courts in the rather long complex, which meant that we had an open, grassy play space as well. To give you a sense of size, imagine four apartment buildings morphed in one across the back with two apartment building framing it out on either side. The interior area was so large that we had a grassy area framing the buildings, room for every family to park their car within the court, visiting guests and all, and a big grassy lot in the middle to boot.

We also had a long, open view, as our court, faced a court and looked out toward the end of the complex, another court. It was the perfect spot for mothers to sit in aluminum and web lawn chairs during the day to chat with other mothers. And it was the place where our parents would sit in the night to escape the heat, drink ice cold beverages, and talk about adult things as we children, supposedly fast asleep in our beds, tried to snatch bits of their conversations above the whir of fans.

At the back of one of the buildings in the end court, out of view of the apartments, was a covered spot for trash (built within the design of the building). Trash collectors picked up our regular trash from outside our doors, but this was a place where you could take boxes and larger items for incineration or removal. And it was generally off limits to children via seeming parental fiat. Which of course only made it more appealing to children and put more children at risk of sneaking there alone, making them vulnerable to perverts and the mean gangs of 10 to 12 year old boys who would roam the complex looking for trouble. (Or just as bad a pair of girls who acted as if they were your friends just the day before, but had chosen to exclude you today. Never walk in on an act of exclusion in progress.)

Schooled as I was on the particular meanness of 10 to 12 year old boys and the tendency of children to throw things on other children you normally couldn't have gotten me within 20 feet of that place. However, on this particular day, as I rounded the corner, heading toward the most magnificent cement terrace with a incredibly vast pastoral view that hid behind the end court like some Roman plaza high on a hill (a place for reenactments of Robinhood and other stories that captured our fancy), I heard children excitedly clustering around the outside of the large opening to the area we called the incinerator. Rats? What? What could be so fascinating?

To my surprise, among the boxes strewn about on the cement floor wriggled a mass of brilliantly green garden snakes. Most about 3 to 4 foot in length. Knowing as I did that there was nothing to be afraid of and of the imminent danger the snakes might be in with the arrival of children, I pushed through the throng and picked up a snake.

Then, I hung it around my neck, its green glory hanging down on either side of me like a stole. I draped one each on the crooks of my elbows and finished off the display with one in each hand, palms up. And from there, arms extended to either side of me as if I were balancing the sun and the moon itself, I walked home toward my mother and the other chit chatting mothers with the other children traipsing behind me. Not at all afraid of having disobeyed the incinerator rule. After all, I was coming home bearing jewels for the lot of us.

To hear my mother tell it, she was sitting there like on any other beautiful day taking a break from her homemaking, when what should she spot, but me walking toward her, decked out in green snakes, as long as I was tall, as if I were the Queen of Sheba.