Katie S. 28

I have had a life long fear of clowns. When I was four years old I went to Courtney Lafluers house for a back yard birthday party. After the cake and ice cream but before the opening of the gifts, Courtney’s father had planned a little surprise for the party goers. He had rented a clown suite, bright red nose, big shoes and all, and had strategically placed a small trampoline on the other side of their backyard fence. After getting a good bouncing start, he managed to clear the fence in a single bound, making it appear to us kids that he had some kind of supernatural clown powers. He then proceeded to do a little magic show, turning a wand into a bouquet of flowers, pulling an unusually long handkerchief out of his sleeve and so on and so forth.

I can’t really recall exactly which of these tricks sent me over the edge. All I remember is that at some point during the festivities I became so terrified that I wet my pants and proceeded to run home crying. Both of my parents, who by this time were rather accustomed to talking me down, were nonetheless unsuccessful at rescuing me from the heights of hysteria. Courtney’s father, good natured man that he was, even came over and took off the nose and the shoes right in front of me to show that there was nothing to be afraid of. But by that time there was just no talking to me. In my mind it was settled, he was obviously an evil clown who had been fooling his poor family into believing he was a loving father for all these years. He had unexplainable super powers that were clearly rooted in the very worst kind of witchcraft; and from that point forward I considered all other clowns, Ronald McDonald included, to be evil by association.

It was also at this age that I began holding church services in my bedroom. I would line up all my stuffed animals on my pink bed spread, and read a few short excerpts from my comic book Bible aloud. Then I would preach hellfire and brimstone until even the happy little birdies on my wallpaper started to look downcast with the weight of deep spiritual conviction. Where I got this notion of church, I have no idea. We weren’t even Baptist.

After I had held a few teddy bear revivals, I decided it was time to write my first Psalm; or rather dictate it. As I solemnly rattled off withers and thous, my mother carefully transcribed every word, and then tucked my masterpiece safely away in a drawer for posterity.

That was my mother’s way. She always made her best effort to take me seriously. Sitting at the breakfast table she would ask me questions like, “if you had to choose one item from our home to save in a fire what would it be and why.” She had no idea that she was teaching me critical thinking skills and how to formulate a proper essay at the age of 4, she was just interested in who I was and what I thought.

In Canada they have, or at least had, something called four year old Kindergarten. Its basically the same thing as American preschool, only colder and with french immersion. I have a few memories from my year in four year old kindergarten. They mostly involve me struggling to understand the world around me.

I remember my mother taking me to Burger King as a treat one day after school. I came home with one of those golden paper crowns, and once my baby sister had settled down for her afternoon nap, my mother and I played pretend. I wanted to play snow white and the seven dwarfs. Since the paper crown was several sizes too big for my head and kept slipping down around my neck, I decided that it would be best if I played the wicked queen and my mother played snow white and wore the BK crown. In retrospect it would have made a great deal more sense for the queen character to wear the crown, but in the mind of a four year old, the heroine of the story always wears the crown regardless of her current social status.

As our drama unfolded, my mother was banished to the woods, or in this case the front steps. It was at this point in our game that she regaled me with her rendition of “Some Day My Prince Will Come” from the Disney version of the tale. Well, being the deeply sensitive and highly literal child that I was, I heard two verses of the song, completely dropped character and burst into tears. I ran into my mothers arms and sobbed for quite some time. When I finally composed myself I explained to my poor baffled mother that as she sang her sad sad song, all I could picture was a poor lonely girl with no one to love, lost in the woods with only a faint hope of some fictional far away prince to keep her warm. I’m really not sure why my mother was so surprised at this reaction, after all, the first time I heard the Beatles song “I want to hold your hand” I cried for a week. I saw a lonely old man sitting on a park bench, reaching out to passers by and asking them to give him the small comfort of a hand to hold, but time and time again he was rejected. Yes as a child I brought new meaning to the term “oversensitive.” I was a deeply analytical, profoundly serious and absurdly literal little girl with an overactive imagination just to confuse matters.

It takes a special kind of person to teach a child as serious and sensitive as I was, and my four year old kindergarden teacher, Ms. Smith, did not disappoint. Somehow, even with 12 other children to look after, she always knew how to connect with me. She understood how I thought, and like my mother, she made me feel like I had her respect. It was Mrs. Smith who taught me to tie my shoelaces, and Mrs. Smith who made the morning separation with my mother a little less traumatizing. Anyway, as fate would have it, my beloved Mrs. Smith happened to be absent on the day of the solar eclipse. I don’t remember who the substitute was that day, I just remember that she did not give me that comforting knowing look that Mrs. Smith did when I walked in the classroom, and the day was already off to a rocky start. Before recess we lined up against a brick wall along the side of one of the classrooms. It was at this time that the unknowing substitute teacher made her fateful remark. “Now boys and girls” she said “there is a solar eclipse today so don’t look directly at the sun or you could go blind.” Well naturally, in my highly analytical yet terribly young mind, I reasoned that if looking at the sun could make me blind, then surely the light in the classroom, which streamed in the windows from that same vicious sun, could also blind me. By the time my mother arrived to collect her hysterical child, I was curled up in a ball under my desk with my eyes squinted shut. I don’t really remember anything about the drive home, but I know that as soon as we got there I crawled under my bed where the evil rays of the sun could not reach me, and there I remained until my father came home from work.

My father was not the most affectionate man, and when it came to skinned knees and spilled milk he was virtually useless, but somehow he always knew exactly how to explain away the things that frightened me in my childhood. His scientific knowledge came in handy around our house more than once as I wrested with the unknowns in the world around me. That evening my father got down on the floor beside the bed under which I was hidind, and using my black pattent leather shoes to represent the sun and the moon, he explained exactly what happened during a solar eclipse. After his demonstration was over, I crawled out from under my bed and followed him downstairs, happy as a clam. That was how it was with me. You had to explain why in order for me to accept something. I simply could not accept the easy answer, which must have been exhausting for my parents.