Oh God BEES

I am petrified of bees.

In fact, petrified doesn’t begin to explain it. I am a big guy, 6’2” and around 250 pounds. I spent four hours a day, six days a week in the gym while in college, and while I no longer adhere to that workout regimen I still have a good deal of muscle on my frame. Other people have told me that I can come across as physically imposing when I want to. 

But if I see a bee, I will flip out, flail my arms, screech like a little girl who just saw a chainsaw murderer coming towards her and everything she loves, and run.

I’m fairly certain this is all my mother’s fault.

Growing up out in the country, we didn’t have some of the luxuries I now enjoy as a city dweller. Amongst those missing comforts was a dryer - for the first decade or so of my life, we hung all of our clothes outside on the line to dry. When you do this, it’s vitally important that you shake the clothes out before you fold them and bring them back into the house. Otherwise, little bits of nature may that have fallen or crawled into your clothes may find their way back inside with you.

Our house was situated at the end of a very long dirt and gravel driveway, about three hundred yards away from the paved road that took you “downtown” to the one traffic light in my hometown. Once you turned off that paved road and down the driveway, you could almost hear the banjo music playing. We were so deep in the woods we had to pipe sunlight in, but even I’ll admit, the home had a very natural charm to it. 

One day, my mother decided it was necessary for us to go to the bank together. Normally I didn’t mind going to the bank because the nice teller there always gave me a piece of Bazooka Joe gum, but for whatever reason I strongly objected to accompanying her that day. She was having none of it and, as she informed me that she most certainly did NOT care that I had a very important video game to play, stuffed me into a shirt she had just brought in from drying outside.

As soon as she got me into that shirt, my objection to going increased tenfold. Whereas before I had simply been putting up the normal small-child “But moooooooom!” resistance, I now began screaming my head off like a demon had clamped its teeth into my very soul. This served only to infuriate my mother further. She herded me into the car, told me to stop screaming, and pulled down the driveway.

Not only did I not stop screaming, but I began inflating. My mother was so angry already at my behavior that she refused to even look at me until we got to the end of the driveway. Thankfully, when she looked over to the right to check and see if any cars or horses were coming, she noticed that I was bright red and approximately double my normal size. It was then that she considered that my screaming might not be entirely related to traveling to the bank. 

While it’s funny in retrospect, at the time this was pretty serious. I was severely asthmatic as a child, was starting to have trouble breathing, and we were at least thirty minutes from the nearest hospital (and at least forty-five minutes from the nearest decent hospital). My mother got out of the car, ran to my side, pulled me out and ripped my shirt off over my head.

Immediately, eight angry bees flew out of the shirt and buzzed off to die, their stingers spent. Although I wasn’t allergic to bee stings, if you jam eight of them into a five year old kid at once it’s still going to cause some problems. Impressively, we made the thirty minute drive to the hospital in less than fifteen, my mother no doubt spurred along by my helpful cries of “Why did you make bees attack me?!” and “Wheeeeeeezeeee...your...fault...”

I was a very melodramatic child. This incident stuck me with a lifelong fear of bees and, eventually, would come back to haunt my mother in during The Church Incident. I was alright, of course, but never have let her live it down.