...my companion and I were talking to a little girl we had gotten to know from the neighborhood we were teaching in. She liked us and would ask us all sorts of questions like: our names, where were we from, why were we in Scotland, what was America like...
One evening while talking to her (she was only 8 or so...) a man holding grocery sacks came pounding up to us and started yelling in our faces at the top of his lungs to leave the kids alone. He became very violent and got "all up in our faces" saying all sorts of evil stuff. If he hadn't been holding his grocery bags of whiskey and cigarrettes he would have laid hands on us.
We tried to explain that we knew the little girl, and she chimed in that she knew us. "Oh, yeah?" he said. "Then what are their names?"
"Julianne and Carrie."
It took the steam out of him immediately and he stalked off cursing us under his breath. In all my days in the slums of Scotland, this is the only time I felt that we were in real danger. But we were protected, and I never hesitated telling anyone my first name ever...
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6 comments:
Was he warded off by the looming 3 nephites over your shoulders? I'll bet he was... :)
I could start with the obvious... not having blinds on my windows as a child...the glowing blue monster in "Dr. Who"...9/11 (those 2 things really shouldn't be right next to each other. It just doesn't seem right.)... How lucky I really am. I've never had cause to be truly terrified for my own safety as an adult (knock on wood). But I was terrified the moment Taylor told me he was let go at Hollywood. I made it go away ASAP because fear and faith cannot exist together, and we were counting on faith to see us through.
Wow, I'm just glad you didn't get hurt, Carrie!
I've been racking my brain--a rather painful process these days--to think of a time I was really terrified. Dad almost ran a stop sign last Saturday night on our way to the temple and we almost smashed into a pickup truck...that was pretty terrifying. I have to say that the times I have been most terrified are when I have a lost one of my children. Carrie wandered away once in Sweden in our neighborhood (actually, you were a real wanderer in those days and I was always frantically searching for you in malls, church,you name it) and I was very calm for the first 15-20 minutes or so, but when we still couldn't find you, I felt this feeling of terror begin to rise. Total panic. It is the worst feeling in the world. You had made your own way to the school playground nearbybut it took awhile to find you. It happened again the night Dad and Uncle Dick left Abby sleeping in the van when they dropped it off to be repaired at a car dealer and forgot she was there. They raced back to get her as soon as I asked where she was but until she was safely home I had that same feeling of terror. (She slept through the whole thing so it wasn't particularly scarey for her!) There's nothing like children to give a person gray hair.
Mo, your stories about losing children made me remember the one time I lost W for longer than 15 minutes. I was at University Mall. I was so frantic! Each second ticking by... It turns out she had wandered away to look at something shiny and sparkly, then wandered very far down the mall when she couldn't find me. She ended up asking strangers for help in finding me. I had called mall security, and it was amazing --every employee seemed to know almost instantly I was looking for her.
Oh, and Oscar wandered into the street today. That was scary, too. (Bad, bad parenting!)
The scariest experience i think i've ever told the family about was the night nol, clay and i got stuck on the face of a cliff in provo's rock canyon. lots of prayers, a pen light and a call to search and rescue later, we made it safely home... i actually though i was going to doe or watch as clay or nolan did. not a very happy experience. not even a good "rush"... just fear. i think i saw the hand of an angel that night though. that was cool.
The first 10 days after one of my children has been born and I suffer from excruciating, painful, physical and emotional anxiety. It is terrifying and I hate it. "But I got better." (Monte Python, Holy Grail, newt scene)
The Bishop called and asked us to speak in Sacrament. For my husband, no big deal, for me, the stuff of nightmares.
We lived in a very peculiar house in Memorial Northwest where the radio and T.V. turned on by itself, glowing lights could be seen around the house at night, oh, and my brother's talking Mickey Mouse spoke to me without any batteries in his rear end compartment. I hated being home alone, my 300 lb. 6'7 stepdad wouldn't sleep upstairs unless I was there because he saw a ghostly Indian woman roaming the halls and looking at him. My Mom has documented people in the neighborhood with the same type of problems and forced the prior owners to admit that the house was the main reason they divorced and left it. The Gospel doesn't allow me to believe in ghosts but I do think that we leave "echoes" that stay on the Earth even when we are gone. Given the choice I still choose house of horrors over public speaking!
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