Someone at work today made a joke about spontaneous human combustion . It totally freaked me out.
When I was a kid, probably 10 or 11, I got a book from who-knows-where that was based on stories from the then-current TV show, Ripley’s Believe It…….or NOT!! You read that correctly. As if the world needed further concrete, scientific proof that I was the uber-nerd, I didn’t even watch the dorky show. I read the even dorkier book they based the dorky show on.
The book was full of people who did crazy-ass things, but it also had paranormal stories in it. There was an entire chapter on spontaneous human combustion. That’s SHC for those in the know, by the way. The stories always were about people who lived alone, hadn’t been seen in a few days, and when neighbors or family searched for them, all they found was a pile of ashes and some personal effect that was miraculously untouched by flame. Usually a cane tip or the soles of the poor victims shoes, sometimes the very chair the poor victim had been sitting in. There was always some quote along the lines of “My God! It was as if he just burned up where he sat!”
Holy. Crap.
Look, I was well aware at the time that the world was a dangerous place. I was in FIFTH mother effing grade. I had seen some shit, you know? But now, in addition to worrying about the fact that next year I was going to have to manage a locker and changing classrooms at school and that my training bra technically had nothing to train, I had to worry about my body turning on me entirely — to the point of bursting into uncontrollable flame?? I fretted about it for weeks. I took extra special care not to get overheated. I worried it, as my mother is so fond of saying, to death. Since I was a pretty anxious kid in general and prone to worrying about random things, they generally left me alone to obsess over things for a while, but apparently eventually I set off even their blunted “What the hell?” meters and they were compelled to ask me what was up. So I told them.
My poor parents. Every parent prepares themselves for the moment their kids asks “Where do babies come from?”……….a precious, unlucky few have to be faced with “I am afraid I am going to burst into flames in the middle of the night and the only thing you will find in my bed come morning is the plastic-y decor left over from the decals on my Wonder Woman Underoos.” (Whatever! You had some, too! You know you did!) Well, my parents tried to blow it off. It’s all legend, it’s silly, that doesn’t really happen. Unfortunately for them, even at the age of 10 I was going to need something more than their lame platitudes and reassurances. After about a week or so, where my position was firmly backed up by a book compiled by interns who worked on a crappy late night TV show while my dads position was backed up by………..his word and nothing more, my dad got serious. Now, this was looooong before the internet, wikipedia, or anything that allowed you to research things instantaneously. My dad, a very rational man of science and an engineer, had to go to the local library, ask a stranger for help, and look up books and articles on a subject he knew was bunk. I assume there was probably even microfiche involved. But he doggedly compiled his own dossier on SHC, and brought it home to me to look over. It appears that, long story short, the victims are almost always long term alcoholics and the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that they were all smoking at the time of the incidents. Umm, yeah, even at 10 I was able to make the connection between a pickled human being and an open flame. Mostly. I won’t say I was totally convinced (hello! I read it in a BOOK! Books don’t lie!), but it reassured me enough to get a good night sleep without being afraid my blanket would overheat me.
So far, Drew is a happy go lucky sort of kid. Then again, I am not certain I was showing an awful lot of evidence of my worry at that age, beyond needing to know my Weebles were taped down at night so they could get a good night’s rest. Which, incidently, still seems pretty reasonable. I was feeling pretty good about that, that Drew might manage to escape the not alltogether fun burden of a mind with the ability to ruminate and obsess over Potential Doom. It only occurred to me today, when my coworker said those words, that this baby will be a whole new ball of wax. If this kids a worrier like I was, will I be able to handle it like my parents — for the most part calmly and rationally? Or will Cliff come home one day to find us both curled up in the corner, worried and anxious about………….oh, hell. Really almost anything. High fructose corn syrup, melamine in food, moldy peanuts, chemicals leaching out of plastic into our hot chocolate?
Wait………..
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