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Our week in the sun just about over, we were riding the escalator up to the second floor at Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix, AZ. Ahead of my wife and I rode a family with several small children. Despite the fact that we were returning back home to ice and snow, I smiled at their happy chatter as they rode along. Something odd caught my eye. There was a girl, perhaps eleven or twelve years of age, at the front of the little group with her back to me. She appeared to be carrying a doll. The doll's hair matched her own hair remarkably well. I was amazed. After closer inspection though I began to think that the kid was playing some kind of practical joke. "Haha, she's trying to make it look like she has two heads. Haha," I thought. Then she turned. Two sets of eyes met mine. She had two heads. I clutched at the escalator's handrail and stared hard into the back of my hand, desperate for something known, something real. Nothing could have prepared me for what I had just seen. Nothing. I tried to act nonchalant but it was just that, an act. Completely unable to cope, my brain simply locked up into the biological equivalent of the Win95 "Blue screen of death." Once on the aircraft, the sight of those two girls looking back at me replayed itself in my mind over and over again. I caught bits and pieces of the conversations around us. Apparently others had seen the young girls as well. Behind us a mother patiently explained the concept of Siamese twins to her curious youngsters. Others clucked sadly and just shook their heads. Trying to bury the shame of my own reaction, I tried to read some Hemingway and put it out of my mind. Why did I react so? Those girls obviously were no threat to me. Their condition wasn't contagious. They were just trying to live their lives as normally as possible. The problem was mine. Guilt began to gnaw at me. Why is the human animal wired to react so to anything seen as being "different?" Why do we initially abhor or avoid anything perceived to be different? It can't all be a "learned" experience, can it? Perhaps this is a leftover "instinct" from ages ago when man was still chasing big hairy mastodons across the frozen prairies of South Dakota. I know that I don't have a clue. I'll leave the answers to the anthropologists or maybe first year psych students. In the aftermath of the incident, I re-examined my penchant for public appearances as "Leah." What if others, upon seeing a red headed six foot something CD, had the same kind of reaction? Did I want to cause others to go through what I experienced? There's no doubt that any anxiety they'd experience would be of their own making, but did I really want to serve as the trigger? For the first time, the idea of going out "en femme" bothered me. I was no longer sure if it was the right thing to do. My public career crashed and burned. |
