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My mother got soap in my
eyes. And I can't swim. Now maybe that doesn't
make much sense, but you would have to have been there. After the
Depression, my father bought a farm and we moved into an old farmhouse
with a leaky roof and cobwebs hanging down from the ceiling, shadowed by
the flickering lamplight. If the lamp wicks were turned too high, the
lamp chimneys smoked up. Water came from a spring 200 feet down past the
cornfield, brought up in two-gallon buckets. A little building with a
half moon on the door accommodated the necessities of nature, located on
the other side of the chicken house. Heat came from a fireplace in the living room, which was also
a bedroom, from a heater in the sitting room and from the cook stove in
the kitchen. There was an old cabin just behind the house, a leftover
from the days when cooking was done away from the main house from fear
of fire. My mother said she cried
when she saw it. But my father went to work, aided by cousins, other
relatives and friends. It became more livable all the time. In those early days of
childhood, my baths came in a large galvanized tub pulled close to the
stove in the kitchen on wintry days. Water was heated in kettles on the
stove and my mother stripped me and put me in the tub while family and
whoever was visiting sat around the kitchen table and talked. No problem with the bath.
But my mother had a tendency to get soap in my eyes. It burned and I
squalled. Only way to survive the bath was to close my eyes tightly the
moment water came close. I still do. Even when I
take a shower and get water near my face, I close my eyes and won't open
them until I dry off after the bath. In college, I joined the
track team to get out of the regular phys ed. program. Learning to swim
was part of the curriculum. How on earth can a guy
learn how to swim if he can't stand water in his eyes? I guess you could call it
a phobia. And heights bother me
now. It's hard to say when that came about. Maybe it was the time on
military maneuvers when I climbed the ladder up a tower at the AAA
battery to observe. The tower probably was no higher than 50 feet. But
when I got up there and looked down, it seemed more like 2,000 feet. I
wondered how the devil I would ever get down. Only way was to take a
deep breath, not look down and, looking straight ahead, went down one
rung at the time. The earth looked beautiful--close up. Flying bothered me the
first trip in a piper cub a friend talked me into taking with him. Only
way I would go was for him to promise to bring it back down the minute
it bothered me. When we moved down the runway and I saw the ground
dropping away, I shouted, "Take me down." "I have to circle
the field to bring it in," he said. As he rose higher to make
his turn, I began to like it. We flew the rest of the afternoon and it
was a real pleasure. After that, flying never bothered me. There's a
different perspective, being inside an entity no matter how high up it
is. But sitting near a window in a tall building, or even looking at a
move with the hero hanging on the edge of a cliff makes the muscles of
my legs tighten. A friend of mine and I
once climbed to the top of the Cathedral in Ulm, Germany, reputed to be
the tallest church spire in the world. As we passed the huge bells, tall
as an automobile standing on end, we hoped they didn't strike the hour
while we were near. At the top, we looked down and both of wondered why
we came up. We were ready to go back down--bells or no bells. We all have some
hang-ups. Some people can't stand being enclosed in close places. That
never bothered me. It's hard to trace back to the origin of our phobias.
But they are there for whatever reason. It is said we should face
our fears to over come them. It would be nice to be
able to swim, but I doubt that I'll ever jump in the water and learn the
hard way. And I'm certainly not going to walk a steel girder of a tall
building just to get over it. I'll just settle for
having both feet on the ground, dry land.
Forget swimming.
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