The Coonridge Digest: Fear and trepidation

Greetings from the Ridge.

I must be getting numb. Used to be I enjoyed a good scary movie but nothing coming out of Hollywood can beat the Queen in Walt Disney’s Snow White. I still get chills when I think about her evil head slowly turning and intoning, "Mirror, mirror on the wall." Forget Frankenstein, The Mummy, and The Matrix, the Black Queen was scary stuff.

A new movie called Boogieman topped the box office for the past two weeks and Hollywood was shocked. In recent years they’ve tried aliens from outer and inner space, dead wives vengefully rising up from the grave, and chainsaw-wielding sociopaths, but nothing seems to push the audience’s horror button. Face it, in 2005 it takes a whole lot more to scare us.

I’ve been wondering what could possibly muster up the goose bumps that Snow White’s Queen used to inflict on me.

One particularly horrible vision comes to mind and I saw it twice last week. I’m driving down a crowded lane in city traffic and I prepare to make a left-hand turn. I look in my rearview mirror and it’s Her. She’s sixteen, her hair is streaked with several colors not known to God, and she has one finger loosely wrapped around the top of her steering wheel while she clutches her cell phone in the other hand. Her eyes are closed in laughter as she chats gaily with another friend who’s probably in the back seat. The chances of her seeing my turn signal in the midst of her heavily hormoned conversation are practically nil. In a moment I’m going to turn left and she is clueless. Forget the boogieman…. nothing scares me like a cell-phoned teenager coming at me on the highway.

Another horrific sight that Hollywood might do well to dramatize is the vision I awaken to most mornings. Herb’s body is sprawled across the bed, his teeth are in the bathroom, and his mouth is wide open. His lips quiver with each gut-wrenching inhalation, and he’s making sounds you only hear late at night on the Animal Planet network. "Herb in the Morning, Part I," would necessitate a new movie rating: PU.

Speaking of fear and trembling, I can remember the day I nearly went to prison. As a joke, Herb’s cousin Floyd called us on April 20 one year. He disguised his voice and said, "Mrs. Crump, my name is Investigator Griswald from the I.R.S. I have a few questions for you." The only thing that kept me from being convicted of first-degree murder was the fact that Floyd lived in Colorado Springs and I couldn’t shoot that far.

There’s one horror movie I face daily. Herb has the unbreakable habit of getting the morning newspaper off the front porch before he puts his pants on. God forbid he might read his news ten seconds late and cover himself up. I live in fear of the day that his morning trot for the news will coincide with the school bus passing our house. Knowing Herb he’d stand up straight and wave. The man has shame, but no sense.

To see if maybe my fear factor had just dulled over the years, I consulted Psychology Today to check out the top fears of 2005. I scanned down the list to conduct a sort of personal inventory. The number one fear was Getting Bad News. Since I married Herb, all other terrors have paled in comparison so I skipped to Fear Number Two: The Dentist (no problem here…I can mail my teeth in), The Fear of Flying (any direction out of Coonridge is a joy for me, even if it’s straight up), The Fear of Foods (I have no idea what this one means unless the staff writers at Psychology Today have tasted the Southwestern Cornballs that Beulah Briggs brings to the Methodist potlucks.) Number five is "Male Performance." (What you never saw, you never miss.) This was followed by "Math Phobia" (I’ve stopped counting…see Fear Five), "Perfectionism" (Oh get real…at our age, who cares?), and Public Speaking (the only thing I fear about this is the category of idiots we let get behind a microphone these days.)

Then I thought of the fears that used to terrorize me as a child….getting sucked down the grating at the end of an escalator, putting three sticks of gum in my mouth and blowing up (thanks for that one, Grandma), and standing in the wrong spot on earth with a 707 jet accidentally discharges its waste material.

But nothing could ever match the fear and trepidation that I feel when the team that brought us "How to Rebuild Iraq" proudly trots out its newest full-length feature, "How To Fix Social Security." Even the Evil Queen’s "Mirror, mirror on the wall," couldn’t compete with the specter of a letter saying, "Dear Mrs. Crump, it is our pleasure to inform you that your retirement funds are now in the trustworthy hands of Enron and Arthur Anderson."

You ever in Coonridge, stop by. We may not answer the door but you’ll enjoy the trip.