There’s no vacation that expresses our fears like Halloween. So in the event you’re like me, you’re glad the spooky day has handed.
The celebration sees people reveling in such phobias as arachnophobia, chiroptophobia, achluophobia and necrophobia. Respectively, the concern of spiders. bats, darkness and lifeless issues.
But if you’re ophidiophobic, chances are you’ll need to cross on this column. Fortunately, the irrational concern of snakes by no means plagued our household.
That’s why years in the past, when my then-teenage son, Michael, requested for a corn snake, his schoolteacher-mother obliged. She was agency in her perception that each one youngsters ought to have the prospect to begin their very own animal kingdom.
But as we might uncover, essentially the most troublesome factor about snakes is that like my teenage son, they have a tendency to flee from their cage. Okay, we by no means put Michael in a cage – he needed to go to high school. But we did preserve him in his room at evening.
When his snake did escape, it normally returned inside the week for meals. Its final getaway got here on the eve of a go to from my snake-phobic mom and compelled us to launch an all-out seek for the critter.
Knowing that snakes will search sheltered warmth sources, we searched each warmth supply we might think about till we lastly observed the pungent odor wafting from the laundry room.
Still unable to see something, my spouse and I tipped the cumbersome equipment to seek out that washer transmissions aren’t pleasant environments on your common carbon-based life type.
Now I warn you that if you’re blennophobic – afraid of slime – you must actually surrender on this column as a result of our corn snake regarded extra like corn syrup – or possibly creamed corn. Take your decide.
But most particularly if you’re olfactophobic – afraid of smells – just like the washer repairman who got here to our home together with his shirt pulled up over his face, you needn’t learn on.
His solely suggestion was that we name a biohazard group. The downside is that these groups have been identified to bankrupt small cities.
So I decided to do that poisonous cleanup myself. Armed with cleaners, disinfectants, sponges, paper towels and plastic gloves, I opened our washroom door and blasted the room in a “cover fire” of deodorizer.
Holding my emetophobia in test – concern of vomiting – I entered the poisonous zone and was shortly pushed again by my old nemesis – a gag reflex on a hair set off.
Bolting from the room, I got here to a tough cease in entrance of my spouse who was carrying the look most husbands know. It was the identical “You’re worthless!” look we get when the keys we’ve misplaced are in our different pocket.
“I’ll do this,” she stated, “but you’ll need to get this machine into the backyard where I can work on it.”
“No problem,” I stated. An hour later, the machine sat within the open air which diluted the scent sufficient for me to take away the motor, transmission and another thingamabobs I didn’t acknowledge.
True to her brag, my spouse spent the subsequent few hours disengaging the stays of the snake simply because the solar started to set on the horribly lengthy, sizzling day.
It had been a day of confronting our fears, together with the pet proprietor’s worst concern – that of shedding their pet. Nevertheless, every of us one way or the other discovered the braveness to push apart our fears and achieve what some had stated couldn’t be executed.
When I consider all of the issues that scare me on this world, I’m grateful that our religious beliefs generally is a nice supply of braveness. The Christian apostle, Paul, wrote that “God has not given us the spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.”
As for the washer, I used to be struck with a extreme case of mechanophobia – concern of machines. Fortunately, I pressed previous my chrometophobia – concern of spending money—and paid a repairman to place these thingamabobs again in place.
— Buy my latest e-book, “Tell It to the Chaplain” on my web site, Amazon or by sending me $20. Send feedback to [email protected]. Leave recorded feedback at (843) 608-9715 or write 10556 Combie Rd Suite 6643 Auburn, CA 95602.
