As a child and into my teen years, I had a recurring nightmare that I one hundred percent pin on my sainted mom, who read five-year-old me a newspaper article about a kid who stepped off the school bus behind a garbage truck, which promptly backed over him. “He was crushed,” she said. “Like a saltine.”
With my own eyes I’d seen my mom crush saltines with a rolling pin while making her trademark WASP meatloaf, which also included ketchup. I imagined this hapless New Haven lad ground to pieces and flattened. That night I dreamed I was pursued by a garbage truck that tracked me, wherever I was, even inside, under the couch, and whose raison d'être was to crush me like a saltine. I would wake, heart racing, just as the truck was about to back up.
My fears invaded my waking life. When the town garbage truck came by, if I was inside, I hid. If I was outside, I’d run and hide, or duck behind human shields, a.k.a. friends and family. Sometime, not much before before I went away to college, the dreams stopped. I figured I was free.
Yesterday, on my morning run, the garbage truck was making its way down the street behind me. Grown-ass lady thought nothing of it until her inner child started freaking out. What if my mother’s long ago reading of that newspaper article was prescient? What if my destiny was death by garbage truck, and fate was literally catching up to me?
Of course the truck passed without incident. Of course I made it home uncrushed, left to wonder at the reach of my childhood phobia. As an adult, I recognize my fear as illogical, unfounded, but as this adult who was once that child, I am a saltine, and the garbage truck, inevitable.