#Television

Our first TV set was a 1950s black-and-white. Like old wooden radios, this one was housed in a nice, tall wooden case, with an open back, which we could crawl into, if we pushed the tv away from the wall. Toddlers can curl up into the tightest spaces!

We will not revisit the time I wedged myself under the sofa, impossibly, and thought I would die there, before Mom finally, mysteriously, magically, extricated me.

Nor will we speak of toddlers who stick their heads through the railing posts of the stairs. What is the word for those banister posts. Spindles? Balusters?

This is a 5-minute freewrite. Write nonstop for five minutes! No pausing to go google the word for those awful things a kid will poke his head through, like a cow in the stanchions, but stanchions are moveable, and stair posts are not.

My sister and my daughter at 18 months

How easy it is for kids to push that head through the spindles; how impossible it seems to be able to back out again. For the parent freeing the trapped child, those screams of terror are the worst sound ever. The panic makes it all the harder: you need to RELAX or you'll never get back out again. How can I relax? the petrified child wonders.

No scary TV show ever compared with the petty little horrors of childhood.

One thing television brought us was the horror flick. "Creature Feature" is one that comes to mind. I recall not one single episode. Nothing on that old black-and-white screen ever scared me the way Mom's Bible did.

FIVE MINUTES came and went. Man, that was fast. If I set a timer for two minutes to do my Libertory-Semond move (a variation on the Epley maneuver for vertigo), it feels like forever. Five minutes for a freewrite? The time is gone in a flash.

Creature Feature

was a TV horror movie series on WTOG in St. Petersburg, Florida, from 1973 (should say 1971!) to 1995. The films were hosted by Dick Bennick Sr. as Dr. Paul Bearer, who hosted a different cheap horror film every Saturday afternoon.

The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out...
Jesus warns of Gehenna, where the worm dies not...

So, back to Mom's Bible. Nothing could be more horrifying than the Old Testament, unless it was seeing Jesus whipped and crucified in the New. Eternal hellfire and damnation, even the worm that dies not, were far less visceral and horrifying to me than the kitchen sink.

Don't ask me why I dreamed what I dreamed. At around age five or seven, a series of vivid and nauseating nightmares began. Looking back, I figure the Bible preceded "Creature Feature" and so I blame Mom's Bible.

There was the sword fight in the woods, the box of heads, the dream that made me feel sick to my stomach for an entire week. Another day, maybe, I will speak of it. Suffice to say, the many hours I spent staring at my mom's illustrated King James Bible included this beauty:

Dreams are mysterious. Ordinary things seen by day morph into monstrosities by night.

I had seen this photo of my sister at age nine months, under the sink. We knew Lori was the most adventurous of the five daughters my poor, frazzled mother had to contend with. I was the blob, the easy baby. She could park me on a blanket in the sun and I'd sit there for two hours, dreaming away, as she washed windows. Lori, she couldn't turn her back for thirty seconds. The kid would be under the sink, eating dish soap, blowing bubbles from her nose.

I was too young at the time to have seen photos of the amputees of World War I,

source

but our mother's aunt was a double amputee, both legs taken due to cancer, and seeing her legless in a wheelchair may have subconsciously fed my nightmares.

More than half a century later, I have yet to unsee the images in my series of childhood nightmares (my own personal Creature Feature!). On the bright side, I almost never think about these dreams--unless something reminds me. Sunday, our daughter sent us a picture of her youngest adventurer, and the dreaded Sister In the Sink dream came back to me like that wall of water in The Poseidon Adventure.

In the dream,

I awoke in the middle of the night (I often dreamed I was waking up in the night). The eerie fluorescent glow of the kitchen beckoned. I followed the light. In the sink, my sister stood, the upper half of her body showing, and she was (impossibly) standing inside the sink. Her eyes were wide open; she was silent, petrified, traumatized. I opened the door to the sink. She was standing on one leg, in a 5-gallon bucket. Her left leg was amputated at the knee. Dripping, dripping water, into the bucket.

I have never managed to unsee this image.

And I am going to stop here. This is more than enough for one five-minute freewrite to the prompt "television."
Day 1297: 5 Minute Freewrite: Monday - Prompt: television