POP HAD A GARDEN HOSE that terminated in the scariest thing I had ever seen (up to age three, that is - since then I have done considerable better...). The "thing" was a nozzle - but unlike any I have ever beheld since (I can't say before, because there was no before - not even "a few months" - all of the Popes in Christendom notwithstanding). This nozzle was sort of a head-like shape with a semicircular slot ('mouth') cut into it so the water would issue in a big fan spray. On one side of the head was a long sharp spike that you drove in the ground at the edge of the garden, you see - so the hose could do its work.
Needless to say my cries soon roused the house, lights snapped on, parental authorities pooh-poohed the idea of a "hose-snake" present anywhere in my sleeping quarters (the wily serpent thing somehow having contrived to crawl out of sight somewhere - under a rug perhaps) - but I knew it was there. Somewhere. Waiting... It has always been waiting. Waiting ever since. Somewhere there waiting for me yet. You know what? There's one waiting somewhere for you, too! 'S God's Truth! Actually, I don't really have a waking fear of serpents at all - and have handled them - as part of my "nature boy" persona - all my life. (In a tent in South Dakota one summer decades later, I slept the sleep of the innocent in a tent full of prairie rattlers - many of whose onetime skins, pulled by me, and tanned in rancid butter stolen from the cook shack, were now wound in hatbands round my field hat as I dozed beneath same... of all this another time...). But try this on your friends some time: when all is quiet in a group (or a crowded theater is good, too!) suddenly make a loud, very loud - "Shis-s-s-sing!" sound (the "hiss" we all know - and recognize - as THE warning of Warnings that something immediate is amiss...!). All heads will pop up! I guarantee! And Silence will ensue!
Why?
A linguist I read once believes this is the "sound of the serpent, par excellence" and in ancient days was likely the only sound in all the land, issuing from many reptilian forms, as it were, who dominated the scene. And it was then that this ultimate warning sound (to mammals!) got "programmed" into the basal stem of the developing brains of our tiny proto-ancestors, those same proto-mammals of yore (often dinner for the hissing reptilians!), and is a primal, atavistic inheritance in our kind to this day. (This same authority also drew my attention to "fact" that certain words somehow "capture" the "idea" of serpenthood - though they seem (the words) to be all unrelated other ways - yet in some "indefinable" way, they do share a "something" here. They include, for instance (not an exhaustive list, by the way): slippery, slimy, slick, slope, slough, slew, slurp, slide, slit, slice - see what I mean? You cannot put your finger (pardon!) on just what it is that "binds" these together - but "it's" there all the same, no? Intriguing...
One night (I guess not long after the visit to Fish Beach) since this is Memory #2, best as I can reconstruct at this remove... I had a nightmare. My first maybe. Who knows? Anyhow, I woke from a deep sleep to peer through the vertical bars of my crib. There gleaming in the moonlight on the floor alongside my crib, lay pop's garden-hose - with the deadly, threatening, spikey, deaths-head nozzle grinning back at me! All coiled and ready to strike!
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