We have adopted a new kitten. This one belongs to the (now) middle cat, who is (now) less bored and more able to express his inner child: growling (in a friendly way), running about the house, leaping and pouncing. New family is often a contentious time, but as autumn chills the air, we find our three felines sleeping ever closer to one another, first rooms apart and now within a foot of one another, the encroaching frost turning strangers into bedfellows.
The kitten isn’t afraid of much. Even large things that make loud sounds only cause him to step back for a moment and observe the situation, then he is right back where he was, investigating. The splashy water room we each step into every day. The hot box in the kitchen with the door which opens down. The tops of bookshelves, the fireplace, door frames, and our heads. His world is adventure undaunted, and we have tried to protect him while allowing him enough life experience to build a map of things-best-not-to-do.
We don’t want him to be afraid. The other cats are not so subtle: they teach him through a steady barrage of growls and ninja strikes (in a friendly way). Do not attempt to ride me like a horse, one says. Do not attempt to bite my tail while I’m sleeping, expresses the other. The kitten jumps back, frozen for a few seconds, then licks his paws and jumbles onward - but he has indeed understood what he is not-to-do. Meanwhile, our human attempts to keep the kitten from jumping on our shoulders like a pirate parrot while we are eating have been, on the whole, less successful.
I do not believe that this wonderful time before Halloween is supposed to be about fear. Instead I associate Spookytime with bravery, with an admission that the world is a scary place, but here we are, dealing with it. Yay for us.
One night a few years ago, back during our National Season Of Near Constant Panic And Crisis, my six year old daughter told me to leave the lights off in her room when I was tucking her in for the night.
“You don’t want the nightlight?”
“Nope. I have to face my fears, Dad.”
I was kind of shocked. “You actually… DON’T. You’re SIX. Did I miss Twilight Sparkle saying this on My Little Pony?”
She sighed and looked at me with the furrowed brow of what seemed to be a much older person. “I can’t sleep with the lights on, but I’m afraid of the dark. So I have to learn sometime.”
“Again, sweetheart, while you have described in metaphor the very essence of human existence, you can deal with all that later because you’re SIX. Plenty of time to ease into the “facing darkness” thing.”
She told me that she just “thought it was time”,
so I turned the nightlight out,
but I kept the hall light on.
My daughter was teaching herself not to be afraid. I thought that was tremendous, and tried to mirror her tenacity by listening to Morning Edition everyday, and BBC World News after. But eventually I was overwhelmed, and had to winnow my intake of current events down to YouTubing Colbert, Oliver, and Meyers monologues.
While my daughter was intelligently attempting to deal with whatever life brought her in the moment, I was chasing fear down the street, yelling “YOO Hoo!”, pursuing what frightened me like an enthusiastic Beatles fan, literally looking for trouble.
This was not the fault of Twilight Sparkle, but instead a dog named Scooby Doo.
I had the metal lunchbox, complete with the thermos with the cap with the little handle so you could drink soup without a spoon. I watched the cartoon every week. I wanted the Underoos, but they were way too expensive. When we adopted a dog, I had the perfect name, because the dog was brown and black, so it was totally obvious, although Scooby Doo was a odd name for a Pekingese (but he more than filled the role - up for adventure, ready for anything, able to ride in a backpack or escape danger down the slide of the swingset in out backyard).
The television show first broadcast when I was three, so I saw every episode over and over again. If you are not familiar, Scooby Doo is an animated program about four friends and their dog who solve mysteries. Each week they uncover the plot of a greedy, jealous, or overambitious person who terrorizes the locals with theatrics, incredible engineering and special effects, and the use of a truly impressive selection of rubber masks, which are pulled off during the last minute of the program as the villain is revealed. Highlights are the custom painted Ford van they travel in (“The Mystery Machine”) and a recurring set piece involving a corridor with doors on both sides where people run in and out of them in an impossible manner. Oh, and the talking dog. The dog talks.
But the program’s greatest gift was the lesson that there is always an explanation for everything. Maybe the Caretaker really wanted the deed to Farmer Jones’ land, or the older sister wanted revenge for the younger sister taking credit for her work, but there was always an explanation. (Later, when the show added real ghosts and creatures to the mix, even the reasons for these hauntings were logical.)
There was a lot to fear out there, particularly in the maker / costuming community, but I learned that I didn’t have to carry dread around with me all the time. Life wasn’t awful, just, y’know, people. Some of them. The ones with masks, mostly.
We used the formulaic certainty of Scooby Doo (and a bit of John Cena WWE wrestling) to teach my daughter how plot worked on tv and in films, to not get so scared in the middle that you didn’t watch to the end to see what happens, to extrapolate situations and motivations in characters, to be able to step back and guess the next twist, to not be afraid of the storytelling. It worked. She then watched and read hundreds of hours of mystery books, movies, and tv shows. Even in the National Season Of Near Constant Panic And Crisis she expressed her concerns with a calm sense of perspective that we, as adults, had to reach on our tippy-toes to match.
Barring our instinctive reaction to the word “BOO!”, humans, like kittens, have to learn to be afraid. I was lucky enough to grow up with a cartoon therapy dog to talk me through all that, which I’ve now made into a family tradition. I hope my great-grandchildren feel the same way about all this, and celebrate courage at Spookytime. Hopefully they won’t take it too far and get a van with some other kids and start meddling with people.
Scooby.