Pleased to Meet You...Hope You Guessed My Name

What are you afraid of?  I mean, what really, really scares you?

If you answered 'nothing'.  You lied.  Maybe you are scared of telling the truth.  Go back, and answer the question honestly.  Are you afraid of...

Heights?  Flying?  Death?  Bears?  Snakes?  Intruders?  Fire?  Love?

Everybody is afraid of something.

I wrote a sketch for church back in the summer time.  It was only seven minutes or so and it dealt with fear...because like I began, everybody is afraid of something.  The sketch was about a man who was afraid of chocolate.  How can someone be afraid of chocolate, you may ask?  It's delicious...right?  Well, in the sketch, he felt he had a pretty good reason.  He knew the fear was silly, but still somewhere in his cranium he associated chocolate with fear.  You see, all of his life, his parents told him he that he was deathly allergic to chocolate, because they FEARed that he would grow up fat.  The woman he was speaking with thought he was crazy, but she had her own fears she needed to overcome too.

All fears have to stem from something.  Fears are about the unknown. The consequences.  If you are afraid of heights, it is the aftermath of falling and landing  that really scares you.  Afraid of fire?  The outcome of being burned and the destruction the fire leaves.  Do you have a fear of love?  Is it because of the rejection that could follow?

Stand up to your fears.  Don't be a coward.  Don't live your life always worrying.

Now, this is the story of how I came face to face with my fear.

Late one night, the kids were tucked soundly in bed.  I was busy upstairs (I believe I was watching a rerun of  "Sanford and Son"  ) and Shannon, my wife, was going downstairs into the basement to put in some laundry when she came racing back upstairs...out of breath...saying "There is a spider down the basement and it's huge!"

Now, I love my wife, but when spider = huge, she means that the spider's body is about the size of a nickel.  So, I did what any loving husband would do.  I told her kindly that I was very busy.  (I think  Fred  was trying to buy something and  Lamont  was having no parts of it)  She insisted that the spider was huge and I was NEEDED!  Well, she is lucky we have a DVR, because I could go be her superman and take care of this spider and go back to doing what I do best.  Watching TV on the couch.

Okay, I can admit when I am wrong.  I WAS WRONG!  This spider was huge.  In fact, this was no ordinary spider.  Nothing of the likes that I have ever seen.  It was a half spider/ half cricket.  And it's body was the size of a golf ball.  I looked and it and instantly my manly manliness took over.  Okay, well, my knees got a little weak.  I think my upper lip quivered some, but I stood my ground.  I looked down at this spider cricket and thought, "this is why Shannon married you, Bill".

I had a home to protect.  My wife and kids needed to be safe.  I turned to her, and in the deepest voice that I could muster I said, " Okay, let's go upstairs.  We can start taking our clothes to the launder mat.  The basement is his now."  But, she looked at me, shook her head and that's when I knew, I had to send this spider back to the fire pits from which it came.

I looked at it with my blue eyes.  It's red glowing eyes tried to pierce my shaken soul.  It's legs hunched and ready for an attack.  I think it's lips were curled.  I don't think Shannon heard it, but I am pretty positive that the spider was bad mouthing my mother and my children. That's when it jumped. Oh, how I wanted to scream.  (Shannon will tell you that I did scream, but trust me...I DID NOT SCREAM!)  Okay, I might have screamed.  He was now hiding on the side of my grass cutting sneakers.  (Yes, he was scary, but also stupid, because I could still see him.)  That is when I saw the wooden baseball bat leaning up in the corner.  What that spider didn't know was that The Surrender (La resa)" by Ennio Morricone was now playing loudly in my head and I was transforming into Sgt. Donny Donowitz aka "The Bear Jew".  I was going to bash this spider's head with that baseball bat.  Turning him into nothing more than a splatter of guts, legs and evil.

I grabbed that bat and said a quick prayer. And with every ounce of my being I felt myself swinging like Mike Schmidt. 


C R U N C H !

A vapor of spider soul escaped and vanished into the air.  I had stood up to the spider cricket and to be safe I gave him the old double tap, just to make sure my family was safe.  I could now rejoin the familiar faces of the Sanfords  and exit this real life Stephen King novel.  It was over.

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