They were totally and completely right.
I spent a lot of time with my cat who had been given to me by our neighbor Linda Wise when I was about five years old. I think the kitten knew immediately what was to be in store for her, using her keen kitty senses, because as soon as her little white paws hit the living room floor, she was off, hiding behind the couch for hours. While she trembled back there, I named her.
Five times I named that cat.
Popcorn. No. Snow White. Uhuh. Snowball. Nope. Peanuts. Nah.
I needed something more original. Something that was as unique as I was. Something no one had ever thought to name a cat before, ever.
So I named her Miss Kitty. Kitty for short.
Kitty curled up at the foot of my bed at night, played with me when she felt like it, tolerated me until she didn't feel like it, and mostly napped in the rafters of the basement. A couple of times, she got out of the house and scared me out of my wits, because I was sure I'd never see her again, but she came back, and she remained an inside cat for as long as we had her, which was until I moved out of the house at 18.
Kitty wasn't my only friend. I also spent a lot of time with my good buddy Pancho. Out of all of the kids in the neighborhood and all of the kids at school, Pancho was my very best friend. She was so cooperative and kind, ate dinner with us every night, and spent the night with me when I wanted her to. She took long walks with me, accompanied by her trained pony and her very colorful and incredibly tame pet parrot. The biggest problem I had with Pancho was getting people to take her seriously. It really bugged me when I had to tell people not to sit on Pancho, or not to step on Pancho, or to stop interrupting Pancho when she was talking. It was just rude. Nevermind that they couldn't see her or hear her. Just because she was imaginary didn't mean she didn't have feelings.
Pancho and I spent a lot of time in the cornfields around our house. Our ranch-style home sat on five and a half acres of land, but we only used about an acre and a half of it. The rest was rented out to Coony Geiger, who farmed it and all of the other fields around our house with corn. So, essentially, our house was surrounded on three sides by cornfields. In the Spring, Coony would pay my parents and plow our garden plot in exchange for the use of the field. This, to me, was just ridiculuous. I couldn't believe that my parents actually got PAID to have Coony plant the corn. After all, a cornfield was better than just about any playground I'd ever seen.
My most fascinating, imaginative and frightening stories happened in the cornfields. When Pancho didn't feel like playing, my other friends (the kind with actual skin and bones and stuff) would play hide and seek in the cornfield. Around the middle of July, the corn was so high you could run through it and no one would be able to see you. We were always very careful not to pull up stalks, because my mom said that every cornstalk we destroyed was robbing Coony Geiger of his crop. So we only ran between the stalks with wide spaces, like where the corn hadn't grown or the corn planting machine had forgotten to drop a kernel. We'd run through those fields, trying to get as far as possible before "IT" could count to fifty, and then we'd scrunch down very low, looking for any sign of "IT"'s feet so that we could take off running again. The leaves of the stalks would whip my arms and legs as I ran by, and later, when I showered, the tiny scratches left behind would burn and itch when the water hit them. That was what summer truly felt like.
I remember one summer taking a walk through the cornfield all alone not long after it had sprouted, so it was probably only about two feet tall. As I was walking, I spotted this strange looking thing sticking up out of the ground, all red and orange and yellow. I crept cautiously up to it, trying to identify it. It kind of looked like it was growing out of the dirt, but the again, it looked like maybe it had been buried there. Upon closer examination, I was sure I knew that it was...
...a chopped off finger!
I examined it as closely as I dared. It really looked like a chopped off finger all right, and it looked like someone had stuck it right in the mud, like they wanted to see if it would grow. It had definitely been there for a while, because, while it wasn't decayed, it was all kinds of freaky colors. I picked up a piece of cornstalk and poked at it very carefully, ready to take off running if the rest of of it clawed its way out of the earth. It didn't move. What if, I thought, this wasn't just a chopped off finger. What if, I thought, it was actually a whole body, and this was just the finger sticking out of the ground! I could barely stand to stay there much longer, but I could barely pull myself away from this creepy thing that was sticking up out of the ground, all red and white and black, just like a dead finger should look. After concentrating on the dead finger for a while and convincing myself that, yes, this was indeed a dead finger, and it could actually even be a dead finger that belonged to an alien (I had just seen Close Encounters and knew that there really were aliens and that they would come to talk to me soon), I freaked myself out enough that I was almost afraid to turn and run. I knew that the minute I turned my back, the dead finger would jump up out of the ground and chase after me. Don't ask me how a dead finger can run. I don't know. But in my eight-year-old mind, that finger was gonna run, and when it caught me, it was gonna do horrible dead-finger-like things to me.
After a while, I couldn't stand it anymore, and I knew I had to leave. I was so afraid that my parents were going to ask me about this dead finger, or, scarier yet, that they were going to find out that I knew about the dead finger they had planted in their cornfield and then they were going to plant my dead finger there, too. I was so afraid of it that I never told them about the creepy dead finger that I found. I was afraid to go back into the cornfield for a week, just in case the dead finger could move around to different parts of the field, or it had dead finger friends who were also waiting all around the cornfield to rise up out of the ground and chase me.
For many years, I believed that there was some kind of finger or dead person or other creepy thing buried in our cornfield. But time heals all dead fingers, and eventually I couldn't stand the thought of staying out of the field, because it was my playground, my hiding place, my magical kingdom. Pancho and I got up the courage to go back into the cornfield, and, before long, we were picking up leftover ears of corn on a hot August evening for her pony, Wildfire. After a while, I stopped being afraid of the creepy dead finger. But I never forgot about it.
It wasn't until I became and adult that I saw that creepy dead finger again. In my adult mind, through my adult eyes, it was very easy to see that the creepy dead finger was just a fungus. A bright red, black and white fungus that looked like a creepy dead finger. My adult mind could see this and know it.
But that doesn't mean that my adult mind didn't entertain the possibility that even a fungus could be an alien.
You never quite get over being an only child.
Photo from ChuckDoherty.com.
