Guess Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf

I don’t know if you’ve ever had this experience, but when I was about ten years old, a wolf would come to my bedside at night.  He wasn’t the sort of wolf that howls at the moon and travels in packs.  He was the sort of wolf that walks upright on his hind legs, with a long snout and a dangling tongue dripping saliva.  In other words, he was the type that would occasionally get bit parts in Disney cartoons.   He didn’t watch me from my closet, or from across the room.  He would come right up to my head, sit on his haunches so he was at eye-level, and stare at me.  What particular interest he had in me, I did not know, and he would not say; but I guessed it was the same interest that Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother with the big teeth had in her; which happened to be the same interest that the huffing puffing pursuer of the three little pigs had in them. 

I suspect that not long before the wolf began to visit me, I had seen him in a movie, or I had come face to face with him on a visit to The Enchanted Forest (a park near Baltimore that had life-size displays of fairy tales).  Maybe one of my brothers planted the wolf thought by calling me a little pig.  I was what we used to call pudgy, or chunky, or roly-poly, as a school photo of me rounding out an official Davy Crockett shirt will attest.  In hindsight, my roly-polyness may be somehow related to the fact that Mom had officially anointed me the Dessert-King.  Perhaps it was one evening as I was exercising my royal prerogative over the family’s last piece of pie that the scurrilous little pig charge was made. 

One would think that the appropriate age for a child to receive a nighttime visit from a wolf would be about four or five.  Why this wolf waited until I was in 5^th or 6^th grade remains a mystery.  Either he was seriously late or I was seriously behind in my terror development, perhaps to the point of being terror-challenged.  I tend to think it was the wolf’s fault, because I have a distinct recollection of being terrified of Godzilla several years before.  

Dougy's Big Adventure

When we were kids, in the fifties (yes, I mean the nineteen-fifties) our parents used to say that my brother Doug was accident-prone.   What they meant was, he had a defective warning light.   In normal children, as you know, that light blinks in their brain just before they do something like jump from a moving vehicle, dive in an unfamiliar body of water, climb a rusty water tower, or otherwise endanger life or limb.  Doug’s warning light had evidently shorted-out in some dirty pond.

Our home in the NE Baltimore area called Overlea was on Powell Avenue, a dead-end street, and we lived at the end of the dead part.  I know it sounds weird that a dead-end street would be called an avenue, but I don’t make the rules, although, of course, I should.   Today our street would be described as a cul-de-sac, but this was back before America purchased the word cul-de-sac from the people of France.  I understand we got it for just $300 billion and Euro-Disney.  This is a lot more than we paid for the word chauffeur, picked up just before the war for next to nothing; but it’s quite a bit less than we paid for the word carte blanche, for which, I was told, we gave the French a veritable blank check. 

Back then (as I was saying before the French intruded into my story) our street was just a dead end. This made it a great place for baseball.  We would play on summer evenings until we could no longer see the ball; in other words, until it got tres difficile.  Often, in those games, the ball would end up in the sewer, so one of us would have to venture down to retrieve it.  You might be thinking I’m setting things up for a story about Doug risking his life to retrieve a baseball, but actually, I plan to tell you about something that happened up on the surface of the street, so you can get your mind out of the sewer.  The baseball reference was just an old man’s reminiscence.  In fact, I realize now, you can go ahead and skip this paragraph.

Powell Avenue was a great street, not only for baseball, but for riding bikes.  Back then, the street was on a substantial hill which descended toward the dead end.  I’ve gone back there as an adult and discovered that in the five decades since I left, the hill has leveled out considerably; and all the houses have shrunk.   I’m told that scientists refer to the phenomenon as Global Flattening or Global Contraction.  Some contraction experts believe that if the world’s major countries don’t take some sort of concerted action on it very soon, say, by next Thursday, we may reach the point of no return, and eventually, everything will flatten out so much that the Alps will be the size of sand dunes, and sand dunes will be the size of ant hills.  There seems to be no clear consensus on what size ant hills will be in the flat future; some experts believe they won’t be hills at all.  But the important thing for you to remember for the next three minutes is that on the particular day of which I speak (or the day of which I will speak if I just get to the story) the hill that we lived on was prodigious.  

The Impossible Mission

When I was in high school in central Florida in the sixties, the Mission Impossible TV show was popular.   In the unlikely event that you aren’t aware of the Impossible Mission Force (IMF), it was (or is) a secret band of government agents---so secret in fact, that if they were killed or captured, “the Secretary” would actually “disavow any knowledge of their actions.”  We were never quite sure who this secretary was, or why it would be such a big deal if she said she didn’t know what these guys were up to.  Now that I have a secretary, I understand how implausible it would be for one to claim no knowledge of her boss’ actions.  The secretary normally gets blamed for her boss’ screw ups.

 

Each member of the IMF was picked for his expertise in deactivating bombs, breaking into impregnable fortresses, or changing his appearance and voice so dramatically that he could trick a bad guy into thinking he was the bad guy’s mother.  This one came in handy.  Whenever they were out of ideas for how to stop a nasty foreign agent from detonating a nuclear weapon and starting the war to end all worlds, his mother would pop into his apartment, and he would casually mention to her, over lasagna, where he hid the bomb.  Then Mom would pull off her mask, the walls of his apartment would fall down, and the bad guy would discover that he was actually in the back of a truck on the way to a federal prison.