Kindergarten and First Grad

Kindergarten and First Grade – (Introduction to Fear)        October 19, 2009

• The very first horrendous fear I remember was at about four and five years of age and was in the form of nightmares about our housekeeper and her big, black, late 1930’s vintage coupe.  That coupe visited my dreams all too frequently, so that I have never forgotten it or the nightmares.  The saving thing about it is that when I was a child, we worked and played so hard that we had no trouble going to bed – we didn’t need a psychologist to determine what was keeping us up at night.  We played as hard as we worked at our chores.  When we had grown enough that our legs would reach, one of our favorite activities after we had been sent to bed entailed my brothers and I laying pillows on the floor in the hallway and climbing the walls until we chose to fall onto the pillows.  What fun!  Of course, we had to do this quietly, stifling our laughter so Mom and Daddy didn’t hear us.  I suppose there was another element of fear in that because if Daddy had heard us we would have been lined up for the leather horse whip!
• The big (to me) black coupe made a lot of noise that must have frightened me but it wasn’t the noise that terrified me in the nightmares.  That black coupe used to follow me everywhere, even going up over curbs as I was running down the sidewalks trying to escape it.  Once I remember trying to hide from it in a row of boxwoods two doors from my home, from which I succeeded to avoid it, running up the little hill of our driveway as fast as my little legs could carry me, crying for my mother as I ran into the house.  In the dreams, I always found her in the basement between rows of sheets hanging to dry or running clothes through the washing machine wringer.   The owner and driver of that frightening black Model T coupe was hired because she could help my mother with her large family and she could bake pies.  My father’s job as a door-to-door life insurance salesman put him in touch with too many housewives who baked pies.  Mother confessed to me one day that Mrs. Twist was the answer to that temptation for my father.  But that car she drove sure made a lot of noise.
• When mother transferred me from public kindergarten to Sacred Heart School for 1^st Grade, I was not prepared for the second scary person in my life, an otherwise pretty lady, whose title as a nun I don’t remember.  But the picture of her in that black garb was enough to frighten me to tears that rolled down onto the new large blue ribbons mother had tied to the end of my long pigtails and I have had no trouble recalling that fear even though I grew to love that lady in black.

Copyright 2009 Rita E. Bauschard