Faux pas.

The scene: September 2001.
Location: Newmarket England.
Time of day: about 9 pm.
Date:  just about any.

I don't know if I have any persistent phobias, but during this particular season of my life, I had a terrible fear of-- wait for it -- snails.

credit

Yes, they are harmless enough.  They are slow moving and not likely to attack.  But for some reason, at just the right time in the evening that year in that town, they became very active critters.  They paved the sidewalks, and every couple of steps in the dark I'd get a crack-squish under my shoe that was very disconcerting.  The displeasure was immediate and lingered on for a while because each of those steps constituted the loss of a life (form).  Sad day for the snails.  My shoes served death to all upon whom they trod.  It was probably heightened by the scarring memory of camping in the back yard in Tennessee and running around in the dark barefoot, then slipping and falling on my hiney when I stepped on a gigantic slug.

As a missionary, we called a spontaneous teaching appointment where someone invited us in off the street a  "step-in" teaching appointment.  These teaching opportunities were celebrated, and much more favorable than the other kinds of step-in, which sometimes included dog feces.  In the case of the snails for those couple of weeks, they'd be more of a step-on.

I bring this up because tonight I stepped on a cucumber slice that my youngest left as a booby trap for dear old dad, right in the middle of the kitchen floor.  I stepped on it, the slice squished, my foot slid.  The terror of the snails rushed back to my memory.  Terrible.  Just terrible.  Hypnotherapy?

Here's a spontaneous list of things which have been under-foot this year in our household.

Object	Pain Level	Squirm Level	General Appraisal
Cucumber Slice	0	9	Contributes to loss of balance, a relatively unpleasant squish/slide with the vegetable underfoot.
Bouncy Ball	3	1	I nearly biffed it big-time on this one.  I felt like those elephants on Dumbo, doomed to be buried in the tent.
Jack	5	2	Yeah, that was bad.  Jacks are spikey.  The squirm came from the thought of my foot being impaled.
Poop on a Rug	0	5	Trumps the cucumber slice in squirm factor.  How'd the poop get abandoned there, anyway?
Needle	4	3	It hurt pretty bad, but there was alot of other anguish at the thought of them lurking in the carpet waiting.
Die Cast Airplane	4	1	If only it were a Tonka Town toy, where everything is rubberized...
Duplo Blocks	4	0	Just painful enough to have disdain and occasionally feel like they should be banished for a few weeks.
Scattered books	1	2	This is a "pain of guilt." It's really my fault, thinking that the bookshelf at the bottom of the stairs was a good idea.
Cheerios/Kix	1	5	The sound of Kix popping sounds JUST like the sound of a snail shell being obliterated.
Grapes	3	1	Yeah, and the grapes feel JUST like the squish of the snail corpse.

I highly doubt that mine is the only house where things get stepped on.  Tell me, what's the worst thing you've stepped on, and what makes it so bad?


P.S. When I was looking for that snail URL, I came across this neat art project.  Check it out: Urban Mollusk.