Childhood and Fears

My earliest childhood memory is of the Patriot's Day parade (if you're not aware, Patriots' Day is the anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord that took place on April 19, 1775. It is universally seen today as the start of the Revolutionary War in the US.). Elsewhere in the country, it more or less passes without mention, but I spent my formative years living in Lexington, so it was a pretty big deal.

The images are hazy, but I remember sitting along the sidewalk. I imagine that this parade had the usual parade fare, but the part that sticks out in my mind and is probably why this is my earliest memory were the fire trucks.

My grandfather in his later years was a volunteer fireman, after being a grade school teacher and a military officer before that. Perhaps it is because of this that his son, my father, has always liked fire trucks and indeed anything that makes a lot of noise and moves at a rapid pace, preferably these two traits at the same time. (see: lightning, fireworks, fast cars) Bonus if they literally make the ground shake.

The fire trucks by themselves were not impressive enough to sear themselves into my memory; what was, however, was the incredibly loud noise that they made. Sitting right next to one that is traveling slowly when it lets out that piercing, banshee wail is quite a different experience than being overtaken by one in traffic, and it terrified me to tears. Thus I and my parents and my brothers, who I must assume were VERY young at the time, gained a vital piece of knowledge: Jonathan does not like loud noises. Mom was left scooping me up and covering my ears, and getting me away from the source of the noise, and repeating a mantra that would become annoyingly familiar to me in the coming years, "There's no reason to cry. There's no reason to cry."

Maybe this seems obvious, loud noises affect kids easily, but for me, it was a different level entirely. I had a similar reaction the first time the fire alarm went off at Day Care.

I lived in an irrational state of fear, in the back of my mind but certainly never gone completely, at Day Care that the fire alarm would suddenly BLARE UP, loudly and insistently. It can't have happened more than once or twice per year, but that was enough to keep kid-Jonathan on his goddamn toes, believe me. The day that the alarm went off while we were already outside anyway was one of the best days of my childhood.

Thunderstorms were the worst. I specifically remember some later date during a thunderstorm my dad whooping and cheering whenever a dangerously close strike would hit, and in that moment, I thought for sure that he must be clinically and irreversibly insane. Some people count off seconds after a lightning flash to figure out how far away the strike was; for me, it was like a warning, "COVER YOUR EARS JONATHAN, YOU HAVE ANYWHERE FROM 1-7 SECONDS!"

Obviously, I'm over this fear, or at least the primal, fight-or-flight-oh-god-the-awesome-power-of-the-sky-will-positively-vaporize-me-and-my-puny-house-and-unsuspecting-family form of it, but now it's more like, "hey, can you pipe down out there? I'm trying to focus on something." I don't really like thunderstorms for this reason. I'm told that a sensitivity to loud noises in this way is indicative of an introverted personality. I pretty much already knew that.

Our fears get more abstract as we age and realize, truly understand and believe, that we are not about to be destroyed by the bolts from the sky or by the dark or by the noises in our closet, and I suspect this is true of most of my peers, too. Once you realize that threat to your existence is comfortably negligible, all of these other fears begin creeping up. Fear of mediocrity, fear of solitude that lasts too long and becomes a deafening, lonely silence, fear that we're missing out on some universal, illuminating experience that everyone else is getting but us. Fear of running out of time, whatever that means to each individual. These fears are more insidious and pervasive, and they don't seem to have simple solutions, or at least, not solutions that you can enact on a moment's notice. Problems that must be lived through to be solved. It can become so ingrained, so resistant to change, that we become shaped by our fear. Inertia is a hell of a thing to fight, and some days, you just flat out don't want to. I'm still trying to figure it out myself.


You know, I'd prefer another round with the firetruck. I think I could handle it now.

-Jonathan "Orlyus"