Little 2-year olds aren't afraid

Chad and Libby have given life to three young faces, broad with sharp eyes and ready smiles. The two year old and only son, Knox, like a noodle, only wants to be pleasing and obeys his babysitters as well as his older sisters. He communicates a large number of his ideas by raising his eyebrows and giving an extended shrug.

When we put him to bed Saturday night (all four of us), Liz read Papa Small by Lois Lenski.

Ever since Strawberry Girl and Betsy Tacy, this is one of my favorite illustrators. Her writing is much like her pictures; simple, poetic, and a little unnatural.

Then Maddie read a book about all kinds of machines. Knox spoke the words along with his sister, his eyes rapturous. "Truck! Bull-dozer!"

And then we quietly turned out the light, we turned on the fan, we left the room. We didn't quite shut the door, but as we silently moved toward the living room, one of the girls mused, "Isn't it amazing that a 2-year old isn't afraid to be left alone in the dark, if you leave a noise in the room?" And she was right. We moved away and he was silent the whole night.

I've been thinking about fear. Recently, I had two mildly frightening experiences of a contrasting sort.

The first was while I was sitting in my little homemade office, in the periodicals section of my school library. I nestle on the floor in the very far corner of the room, next to a nice stack of American Poetry Review and the American Journal of Sociology. From my corner, I can't see much, except the repetition of the bindings of hundreds of journals standing vertically row by row, and the respite for the eyes, the long horizontal shelves themselves.

Because periodicals are periodicals, this room has the feel of an attic; everywhere, piled high, there are the saved remains of someone's past life. There are items from the 1960s and earlier --remnants from a corporate life (as I'm learning) far different from the one Covenant is living now. There is a staleness about the room. There are never very many people around, unless they're passing through to the Childrens' literature section or they, too, find solace in the silent journal archives. I comfort myself that no one can see me back in my haven, unless the window blinds are up. It is one of those rare places of privacy on campus.

The other day, I was sitting typically, with my mind buried in my homework. I heard a soft sound near me. I looked around, but all I could see through the shelving was a small strip at eye level, right between the stack of periodicals and the shelf above them. Usually I just see the next row of journals, but this time as I watched, my narrow strip showed me a pair of pant legs, walking down the aisle slowly. They stopped, two feet from my face but separated by the journals, the face hidden. They quivered there for a second, and then the Headless Pants turned and silently left.

I will never know who that was. But I was frightened by the presence of an animate object amid the proliferation of pages and pages, the ideas and words, a person come so close but still so distant simply because the face was out of view.

A few days later, I was using one of the school computers to peruse Amazon.com. All the computers at Covenant are on a network; when prompted, you type in your user name and your password, and the computer becomes yours for a little while. All the files and settings you have saved on the network are there when you sign in. It is a funny mechanical kind of coming home.

When I launched Amazon, the mysterious Amazon We greeted me like an old friend. "Hi Charlotte Okie," it said. "These are some items we thought you'd like." I'm used to these inducements by now, as a child of the technological age. I always assumed that the choices made for me were determined by some mathematical formula based on the HTML of the objects I'd already bought.

But this time they were jarring. The math hadn't worked. All the
suggested items bore no resemblance to anything I'd looked at recently. Suddenly, my trust in the blank movement of my computer world seemed unreliable, able to be sabotaged. Anyone could have entered my account and posed as me. Now if I was not charlotteokie, should I click somewhere to find my true identity?

Twice I've felt the imprint of someone walking into territory which, for whatever reason, I've claimed as my own. In the physical stacks, the history of an institution in journals it has received, and the warmth of a nameless person there with me; in a virtual shopping basket recommended for someone who isn't me by a computer who claims to know me; in these things, something was uncovered. Briefly, I felt revealed and vulnerable.

But for a two-year old, there is no clothed and naked. There are only the beginnings of vulnerability. With a sleeper, a crib, and a fan, there is nothing to fear. There is no privacy to breach; he is content in his sister and parent-filled world. With no walls constructed of rights and privileges and fears, he is content to play, sleep, and obey.