We Are All The Seven Dwarfs

When I was a lad, roughly six or seven years old, I had two morbid phobias: hippies and kidnappers. Hippies, because my Irish-American great-aunts, who lived upstairs, had utter contempt for everything stemming from the culture of the 60's (or, by then, early 70's) spilling out on all sides around them. They hated hippies, and I didn't know what hippies were, although I knew what they looked like, so my aunt explained that they're dirty and they don't pay their bills. I didn't know what bills were, but I figured those hippies must be very naughty to shirk this mysterious duty. I also knew there were "drug fiends" out there - that was my official term - and I think I assumed they and the hippies were one and the same.

I was also afraid of kidnappers. It was the age of the Boston Strangler, in Boston, and there were lots of other little mini-atrocities in the news, and everyone was neurotic.

But then I somehow assumed that the hippies were the kidnappers, so I would watch closely for hippy-ish vehicles as I walked the two-tenths-of-a-mile to school, and would run back in terror if I saw something like a beat-up Volkswagen Beetle. My mother didn't have much empathy for my phobia, even though I'm sure she didn't like hippies either.

But Daniel, at roughly the same age, turns out to be terrorized by something much more timeless, and yet more immediate in their lurkage around the domicile:

Tonight, Daniel noticed that I had opened the crank-driven windows next to the kitchen sink. He hadn't really experienced windows like that before, and didn't realize that we had them in our kitchen and really wanted to engage this new technology, so I indulged him, helping him open the window as he stood on the counter, bending over to turn the crank.

As he completed closing the window, he gestured first to the right, out the window, into the night, and then to the left, out the same window, saying:

"Like sometimes I'm afraid a witch would come around this way and scare me, or come around that way and scare me..."

This fascinated me. It never would have occurred to me that my six-year-old would be afraid of witches in our very own back yard. So I had to ask him more about the subject.

Daniel explained that, having seen Snow White (two nights ago), he worries that a witch might come after him when he's alone upstairs, or when he's in the bathroom.

(February 7, 2012)