Writing - Miscellany

Giving

The best gift I ever gave my cousin Sol was the Complete Campbellford Dictionary of Phobias (Illustrated).

Sol was, and still is, I guess, seeing as how he’s miraculously still alive, if you call still living with my Aunt Edna at the age of 42 and maintaining a career in the custodial arts in the transportation hubs of the city any kind of life, your standard, everyday phobophobe.

He’s afraid of being afraid.

If there is a fear that exists out there in the world, he wants to face it head on. He wants to conquer it. He wants to fear nothing except fear itself.

He’s conquered many fears over the years, oftentimes taking on several at a time. One of his most memorable stunts helped him conquer arithmophobia, dishabiliophobia, mottephobia and selenophobia all at once. Specifically, he set himself up in a glass box on the corner of 8th and Main and started undressing in front of onlookers by the light of a full moon while an assistant, my cousin Eddy, shook a bag of live moths into the box, moths he had to accurately count as they flew every which way around him.

When Sol learned of a new fear he set out to conquer it right away, but lately he’s been dejected, sad, distressed. He’s been asking around, seeing what people are afraid of, looking for new fears to conquer, but no-one has given him anything new to work with. Strangers on the bus would either suddenly pretend to be asleep as he started talking to them or they would give him any answer they thought he might want to hear.

“Heights,” one said.

“Spiders,” said another.

And Sol would become frustrated because he had gone skydiving with spiders down his pants years ago and he knew there were fears out there he hadn’t even thought of and he feared never being able to conquer them. If he didn’t conquer them then he must be afraid of them. So goes the curvy logic of a phobophobe.

I walked into the bookstore one day last December because I had finally come up with something to say to the blonde who worked the front counter when she asked me if I had a club membership. I had decided I would actually verbalize my negative response in English this time and had even worked up the courage to ask her to sign me up when out of the corner of my eye I saw the big red book with the word Phobia down the side of it in blue.

The Complete Campbellford Dictionary of Phobias (Illustrated).

I instantly thought of my cousin Sol and how excited he was the first time he learned he wasn’t a genuphobe and that knees, no matter how many he looked at through a series of cleverly placed mirrors in the Macy’s change rooms, would never haunt his dreams or keep him awake at night in a cold sweat.

As I flipped through the A’s I pictured Sol bravely conquering ablutophobia, bathing himself and washing himself up to five times daily, until he gave up cleanliness entirely, after reading further, to prove to himself and the world that he wasn’t an automysophobe.

In all my excitement in finding the book I suddenly found myself lying to the blonde, telling her that I was indeed a club member and making up an extravagant story about my membership card being in a wallet I lost in a mugging in Tanzania. She dismissed me with her eyes and as I left the shop, still thumbing through the book, I learned that I am apparently not an aviaphobe. I have no trouble lying whatsoever.

I’ve seen Sol exactly twice since I gave him the book last Christmas. The first time he needed my help to hire a local teenager to rob him of his toads, scratching ephebiphobia, harpaxophobia and bufonophobia off his list forever, and the second time he was in the frozen foods at Morty’s debating which brand of French fries to purchase. I told him his attempt to conquer francophobia was quite lame in comparison to some of his other stunts and, not only has he not called me since, but as a result now Aunt Edna and my mother aren’t speaking either, which is not necessarily a bad thing, if you knew my Aunt Edna.