Xylophobia

For devout Christians, as proclaimed in Proverbs, “fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”  For a bumbling troll like me, misspelling the word xylophone is also a pretty good start.

When I threw myself at the internet to check out “xylophone” the other day, I discovered “xylophobia” and, in the process, learned something.

Xylophobia is, by definition, “the irrational fear of wooden objects or forests.”

“Irrational” is the tricky part here.

Maybe fearing a child’s wooden rocking horse or a highly polished mahogany salad bowl is somewhere in the range of irrational, but I think the haunted forest in the Wizard of Oz was pretty darned scare-worthy.  I would place a “rational” sticker on fearing that.   I am also not crazy about wooden marionettes.  I especially dislike dancing skeletons because—you know what?—they are skeletons and they are dancing.

That just ain’t natural!

As I sit here thinking about this, I am also afraid of a certain kind of stick.  I discovered one of these sticks in a pine forest many years ago when, for reasons not clear to me now, I and my friend, Mark, engaged in a stick-throwing war.  Clearly, we should have better defined the size of sticks allowed for throwing long before our first (and last) battle.  I really wish I could tell you that I “was just a dumb kid” and didn’t know better, but I was nineteen or twenty at the time.

For a while we had big fun.  We flung sticks at the trees behind which each of us stood in tight profile, hiding.  Some sticks cracked solid against our trees, shattering into a spray of splinters.  Hooray for that!  Some sticks whoof-whoofed past our protective trees, end-over-end, and fomped harmlessly against the understory at some distance beyond.

I discovered the sort of stick that scares me when I decided to peek out from behind my tree and see if Mark had slipped behind a new tree.  The sort of stick I am talking about is about eighteen inches long, a bit under two inches in diameter, and it is three feet from your face—streaking at you—when you poke your head out from behind a tree.

The stick caught me square in the forehead, end first.  I don’t recall any particular sound upon impact.  I simply recall gasping before I fell into an enormous black void.

Mark was very excited when I fluttered back up into the light from the void.  “You broke the stick with your head, Kidd!” he exclaimed.  He held the stick before me.  He may even have been a little concerned for my welfare.  “But you have a cut on your forehead.”

Sure enough, I was bleeding.  I had broken the stick.  My head thumped with pain.  In a normal setting I likely would have gone to the emergency room for stitches, but we were hours from town.

Here we are, all these years later, and I still have that damned stick.  I carried it out with me that day.  Today, you can find it at the bottom of a dresser drawer in what was once my daughter’s bedroom.  I keep it as a good reminder of something…I just can’t remember what.      

-- Mitchell Hegman