Soap got in my Eyes

My mother got soap in my eyes. And I can't swim.

Now maybe that doesn't make much sense, but you would have to have been there. After the Depression, my father bought a farm and we moved into an old farmhouse with a leaky roof and cobwebs hanging down from the ceiling, shadowed by the flickering lamplight. If the lamp wicks were turned too high, the lamp chimneys smoked up. Water came from a spring 200 feet down past the cornfield, brought up in two-gallon buckets. A little building with a half moon on the door accommodated the necessities of nature. Heat came from a fireplace in the living room, which was also a bedroom, from a heater in the sitting room and from the cook stove in the kitchen. There was an old cabin just behind the house, a leftover from the days when cooking was done away from the main house from fear of fire.

My mother said she cried when she saw it. But my father went to work, aided by cousins, other relatives and friends. It became more livable all the time.

In those early days of childhood, my baths came in a large galvanized tub pulled close to the stove in the kitchen on wintry days. Water was heated in kettles on the stove and my mother stripped me and put me in the tub while family and whoever was visiting sat around the kitchen table and talked.

No problem with the bath. But my mother had a tendency to get soap in my eyes. It burned and I squalled. Only way to survive the bath was to close my eyes tightly the moment water came close.

I still do. Even when I take a shower and get water near my face, I close my eyes and won't open them until I dry off after the bath.

In college, I joined the track team to get out of the regular phys ed. program. Learning to swim was part of the curriculum.

How on earth can a guy learn how to swim if he can't stand water in his eyes?

I guess you could call it a phobia.

And heights bother me now. It's hard to say when that came about. Maybe it was the time on military maneuvers when I climbed the ladder up a tower at the AAA battery to observe. The tower probably was no higher than 50 feet. But when I got up there and looked down, it seemed more like 200 feet. I wondered how the devil I would ever get down. Only way was to take a deep breath, not look down and, looking straight ahead, went down one rung at the time. The earth looked beautiful--close up.

Flying bothered me the first trip in a piper cub a friend talked me into taking with him. Only way I would go was for him to promise to bring it back down the minute it bothered me. When we moved down the runway and I saw the ground dropping away, I shouted, "Take me down."

"I have to circle the field to bring it in," he said.

As he rose higher to make his turn, I began to like it. We flew the rest of the afternoon and it was a real pleasure. After that, flying never bothered me. There's a different perspective, being inside an entity no matter how high up it is. But sitting near a window in a tall building, or even looking at a move with the hero hanging on the edge of a cliff makes the muscles of my legs tighten.

A friend of mine and I once climbed went to the top of the Cathedral in Ulm, Germany, reputed to be the tallest church spire in the world. As we passed the huge bells, tall as an automobile standing on end, we hoped they didn't strike the hour while we were near. At the top, we looked down and both of wondered why we came up. We were ready to go back down--bells or no bells.

We all have some hang-ups. Some people can't stand being enclosed in close places. That never bothered me. It's hard to trace back to the origin of our phobias. But they are there for whatever reason.

It is said we should face our fears to over come them.

It would be nice to be able to swim, but I doubt that I'll ever jump in the water and learn the hard way. And I'm certainly not going to walk a steel girder of a tall building just to get over it.

I'll just settle for having both feet on the ground, dry land.