Day 121: The word is not in my vocabulary....-- Fflewddur Fflam

The word is not in my vocabulary....In this case well chosen my dear.-- Fflewddur Fflam, The Black Cauldron

After the daring escape from The Horned King's dungeons, Fflewddur makes this remark after Princess Eilonwy asks if he was frightened. His magic harp started to break, so he admitted the truth to save his harp strings.

Have you ever been frightened? Have you ever been frightened but couldn't show it? Were you teased if you were? I hope you weren't. How did you react when you were scared? Did you run and hide or did you act like it was nothing when it really was more terrifying than you let on?

It's ok to be frightened sometimes. I'm not going to lie, the world is a big scary place. Yet it's a wonderful place too. I've been scared and frightened many times in my life, feelings I don't like to have. I've also been in positions where I've had to not show how terrified I was to keep someone calm. One of the more recent times was when there was that massive tornado outbreak in 2008. I was living in Arkansas at the time with my family. During this particular storm, it got bad enough that my dad went to go check on my little sister at her house, leaving my mom and me to watch her two young children, my then-5-year-old nephew and not-yet-2-year-old niece, and our pets at our house. During that time he was gone, we had an EF5 tornado hit our back property line, going in between our detatched garage and our neighbor's trailer before it went down and crossed the White River and destroyed half of Gassville, AR. Both my mom and I were beyond terrified, yet we had to stay calm so the kids wouldn't worry. We just hunkered down in the hallway with all the doors closed so if the windows blew out we'd not get hit by the glass shards. We sang songs, played with cars and read books while we waited for my dad to come back. We also had to explain to my nephew why we had to stay in the hallway because he didn't understand why he couldn't go into the living room to play like he normally does during a "simple" storm.  When dad came back, he told us of the damage along the way and how he had to change lanes on a 2 lane road because of all the downed powerlines in town. Somehow we got extremely lucky. The tornado only lifted some shingles from our house and took down a lot of branches. The neighbors, who lived in a trailer, dealt with the same thing. Yet going to work the next day, riding through Gassville, it was like a warzone with all the broken windows, roofs and trees. I still vividly remember this tornado, along with several others. They are facinating to watch forming in the sky and touch down, but they are extremely dangerous.

So always remember that it's ok to be scared and just do your best to not let it completely run your life and as always Keep Cooking with Character!