My Real Life Nightmares: Part One

Unless you are a freakishly secure person, or a very heavy sleeper you know the terror of a nightmare. You’ve felt the embarrassment of being naked in public. You’ve known the frustration of not being able to locate your locker. You’ve shared in the dread of being chased only to discover you run in slow motion. You’ve watched with horror as your nose dissolves into your face…or not. You know, whatever. You know how bad dreams take you right up to that moment before you hit the pavement, and then you wake up. Granted sometimes you wake up punching your sleeping husband, crying, and giving him ultimatums, but eventually you get a grip and realize with relief that it was just a dream and that you still have all your front teeth.Then there are times when horribly embarrassing, emotionally scaring things happen to us in real life and the only way to make ourselves feel better is to share these horribly embarrassing, emotionally scaring occasions on our blog for the enjoyment of friends and family members. So without further ado I give you My Real Life Nightmares: Part One. A little personal history: Until I came to live in Utah, my senior year of high school, I lived with my family in a very secluded, wooded village in Northern CA. When I say secluded and wooded, I am talking no traffic lights. No lamp posts. You know how when you go camping in the middle of nowhere. Well, you take a couple lefts and that’s where I lived. We did have neighbors, but it was hard to see them through the trees. And when it was dark outside you could see every star in the constellation. Very remote. Very beautiful. Very spooky to be home alone.
My dad was the manager of a geothermal power plant and he was NOT well liked. He had a tendency to take over other people’s jobs, and that tended to rub people the wrong way. At the time of this story, one of the men he had fired had been calling our house. He seemed to always call when my dad wasn’t home and if Angie or I picked up he would harass us. Pretty creepy.
I was probably fifteen at the time. It was evening and Mom and Dad were gone. He called and I hung up on him. Not much later the phone rang again. I answered and was greeted once more with “Your dad home?” That was it. In emotionally charged situations I often morph from harmless innocent into dirty fighting sailor with tats. Not unlike Jekyl and Hyde. I turn into my father. I let the dude have it. “Listen ^&%^&! If you ever call back here again I will %#$$##@! all over your sorry $#@!!*!” Silence. That’ll teach the scumbag to mess with me. And then, “Diana? Is that you? This is Brother Moore from the bishopric.”

Oops.

Morphing quickly back into harmless innocent, I cried and explained and apologized. But I couldn’t help but notice a little gleam in his eye whenever he saw me at church from then on. Cussing out a member of the bishopric- one of my more nightmarishly embarrassing experiences. Don’t think I ever gave Dad that message. And I don’t need to tell you that Brother Moore never crossed me again.