Overcoming a Childhood Fear

05/10/24 • 4 min

In this story, I share a childhood fear that I outgrew.
Admittedly and with only minor apology do I share the truth that I’m obsessed with dogs. The apology is to those with whom I walk as the canine imperative forces me to stop and pet any pup in my path. I love almost every dog I meet and communicate with them in a way that makes me, dare I say, gifted? It IS a gift to be able to look into a doggie’s eyes and let him or her know that they’re safe with me, that I understand how hard it is to wait to be fed, to stare at the back door when you just have to pee, to have to be leashed, outdoors, like a wild animal. This makes it all the more difficult for those who know me, even for me, to understand that at one point in my way distant past, I was actually afraid of....cats.
I tried connecting in the way that I did with dogs, but they always walked away, unimpressed. Sometimes they hissed. Or swatted a paw at me. So rude. Two women – Ceil and Barbara, lived together across the street from us with their two cats: Penny and Kitty. – My mom said that Ceil and Barbara were old maids, like they didn’t luck out when husband shopping. I pointed out that they were a happy lesbian couple – it was obvious. They drove to their jobs at Polaroid together every morning and, in the evening, they called “Penny, Penny, Penny, Penny....here Penny, Penny, Penny” and “Kitty, Kitty, Kitty...... here Kitty, Kitty, Kitty.” It was the soundtrack of my childhood, punctuated by an occasional piercing cat cry that left me glad there was a solid door keeping me safe inside and them outside in the dark. I’d be walking down the street to school and one of them would dart out from behind a bush, scaring the bejesus out of me. (I looked it up. It’s a word...Irish in origin...small J so I’m assuming not disrespectful....) For years I would cower if a cat was anywhere in the vicinity. Cower. It’s true.
And then there was that one long night the summer after I graduated from high school, when I might have ingested a hallucinogenic substance. After listening to Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd on some guy’s waterbed – he was elsewhere - I wandered up to the apartment roof to gaze at the stars. It was so peaceful, and I was perfectly relaxed, lying on my back, when seemingly out of nowhere a cat sauntered up to me. She walked toward me slowly, looked me right in the eye with what I interpreted as kindness, and lied down next to me. For the first time, I wasn’t afraid of a cat. It was like someone flipped a switch and we were two beings, basking together in the warm summer night under the stars. I gently pet her coat and she purred in bliss.
Was it a magical roof? Do I attribute the sudden cessation of my fear to the fact that it was 4am, that she was a particularly docile cat? Or should hallucinogenic substances be investigated as a tool for ridding people of phobias? I don’t know...nor really care. While for the decades since, I haven’t been drawn to felines the way some people are, I can’t say that I’ve ever felt afraid again. Except for that one time when I was bitten by an adolescent tiger in a Mexican zoo....but that’s a different story.
Joanne’s book, “By Accident: A Memoir of Letting Go” is now available from your favorite online book seller. Stay tuned to hear if Joanne will be speaking at a bookstore near you. If you’re interested in having her come to your local bookstore, contact her directly at [email protected] or get updates on her website at joanne-greene.com and make sure to sign up for her newsletter!

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A Journey To Alabama

On vacation, we travel for rest, relaxation & adventure. Other times, we brace ourselves and head out into a great unknown to bear witness, to expose ourselves to the horrors of history, to learn about people and actions that have impacted countless others, for generations, so we don’t let it happen again.
Visiting the Theresienstadt and Auschwitz concentration camps years ago was like that for me. Seeing where the horrors took place and hearing from people who lived it made history come alive in a very different way. Yes, it was painful, but unlike so many Jews, including my great uncles, I got to walk out and reboard the bus.
In many ways, my recent civil rights trip to Georgia and Alabama was like that. When you’re face to face with people who were there, on the very ground where atrocities were committed, you can’t pretend it didn’t happen. And knowing can lead to action.
As a child, outside of Boston in the early 1960’s, I heard about the civil rights movement. Of course, everyone is created equal, I thought, no matter their skin color. Why then could Hattie, our cleaning woman’s daughter, come and play at my house but I wasn’t allowed to visit her? If her neighborhood was dangerous, as my father warned, why did she live there?
The more I’ve learned about our country’s history, from slavery, through Jim Crow, the great migration, the fight for voting rights, police brutality to young black men, and mass incarceration, the more curious I’ve been to hear personal stories, especially from those who were on the front lines. As with Holocaust survivors, time is running out to hear first person testimonies from Bloody Sunday on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, and from the park in Birmingham where vicious dogs and high-power water hoses were set on Black children.
Reading books, listening to podcasts, and watching films about the arc of African American history is powerful and, I believe, essential. To understand race relations in the U.S. requires an understanding of what’s taken place for hundreds of years and what is taking place today. But sitting with people – face to face – and hearing how their lives have been defined by the civil rights movement provides a deeper level of impact.
“I don’t know what it’s gonna take to make the world right. I do know that you should not be sitting, waiting for it to happen, for somebody else to do it.”
That’s the voice of Joanne Bland, a wise, passionate, straight talking, 70-year-old Black woman from Selma who vividly recalls staring into the window of the local drugstore where only the white kids could order sodas and sit at the counter. We met her in a large, dark space filled with artifacts and memorabilia from her life of activism. As a child, she told us, the women of her church were organizing to be able to vote in the upcoming elections. Then Reverend Martin Luther King Jr came to town and organized a Sunday protest march across the Edmond Pettus bridge. Joanne was 11 and she went with her then 15 year old sister, Lynda. When they came up over the high point on the bridge, they saw sheriff’s deputies, mounted on horseback, blocking their path. Within minutes, they were being chased and beaten. Lynda sustained serious head injuries but a few days later, stitched up and ready for more, Joanne’s sister went on to be the youngest person to march all the way from Selma to Montgomery.
Joanne Bland is among many featured in an excellent NPR podcast series entitled “White Lies” from which this audio was taken.
“When you talk about reconciliation, you have to talk about a way to distribute the power and nobody wants to give up any power. Any time there’s a minute shift in power, from the people who are holding the power, a battle ensues. I can give you a perfect example: the signing of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Tell me one year it has not been under attack. C’mon, I’m listening. So, if voting’s not important, why would you try to keep it away from me and why would you try to stop people from voting after they get the right to vote if it wasn’t important?”
Joanne Bland co-founded the National Voting Rights Museum in Selma. Her sister Lynda Blackmon Lowery’s book “Turning 15 on the Road to Freedom – My Story of the 1965 Selma Voting Rights March” is appropriate for young readers and is available on Amazon. In Birmingham, Alabama, we had the privilege of spending an hour with the Bishop Calvin Wallace Woods Senior, perhaps the feistiest, most passionate 90 year old I’ll ever meet. He told us about the March on Washington in ’63, what it was like the day the 16th Street Baptist church was bombed and those four young girls were killed. Hearing his voice crack as he shared the pain he and others endured at the hands of Bull Connor, then commissioner of public safety in Birmingham, was so powerful.
“During the movement, the Lord brought different songs to us. Sometimes, we didn’t know what people were going to sing but he always...

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Embracing Aging

Joanne’s book, “By Accident: A Memoir of Letting Go” is now available from your favorite online book seller. Stay tuned to hear if Joanne will be speaking at a bookstore near you. If you’re interested in having her come to your local bookstore, contact her directly at [email protected] or get updates on her website at joanne-greene.com and make sure to sign up for her newsletter!
In this story, I embrace aging.
We had just shared Muir Woods with our grandchildren, ages 3 and 5. They seemed to appreciate the silence of walking through the Cathedral Grove, the majesty of being surrounded by redwood trees many hundreds of years old. Walking to the parking lot, en route to the next activity, we passed an abandoned phone booth, stripped of all equipment, but still standing as though in tribute to another dimension.
“What’s that?” asked my granddaughter, and I promptly realized that I, too, was from another time.
“Years ago,” I began, “people didn’t have cell phones. If you wanted to make a call when you weren’t at home, you had to look around for one of these. Phone booths, they were called. Some had doors on them; others were open like this one. Then you had to have the right number of coins to insert in a slot so that you could make a phone call.”
I was pleased with myself for explaining the concept in so few words, but she looked right through me, as though I’d been speaking a foreign language. To her, I was.
She can’t imagine life without a smartphone, the internet, a microwave, and Alexa. Why would she?
It’s a slow descent that happens if you continue living. In fact, it’s probably happening to you right now, accelerating to the point where you might find yourself saying “When I was your age, I had to walk across the room to change the channel.....to one of the two other channels.”
One minute, you’re rolling your eyes at your parents’ habit of clipping coupons; next thing you know, your kid is dumping expired condiments that have been in your refrigerator for years. “You don’t have to be so frugal,” I told my mom when she couldn’t break her old habit of making do to avoid spending money because, heaven forbid, it might run out. Now, my son questions why we fly coach, check the sale rack first, and get so much pleasure from following American Idol and So You Think You Can Dance.
Growing older, I’m beginning to understand, means being outraged at how much things cost nowadays, at being asked to give a 20% tip when you ordered your food at the counter, at being charged a convenience fee to order your ticket online when there’s no one in the box office to sell it to you any other way. To appear “with it”, we accept these changes as though they’re technological advances. How the hell am I supposed to remember every password? Have any idea where I parked my car in the garage that’s the size of six malls? Not wear the same thing to an event with the same group of people again and again? Either there’s an app for that or you just take a photo. I know; it’s easy.
“Count your blessings” seemed like the corniest possible phrase when my mother said it. Now, I realize how well it works to counter self-pity and keep you from falling into despair. I’m healthy. My husband’s healthy. Our kids and grandchildren are healthy. I am so grateful. Now wasn’t that easy?