Status Update: Scary Wooden Horse?

As often happens, I'm bemused by a comment a shopper made on something I've displayed for sale...

The object is a wooden horse. I don't know when or where it was made--possibly by hand. It's unpainted, naturally a chocolatey shade of brown, a hard smooth glossy wood that didn't splinter even when broken. The horse was meant to be a wild male, rearing and threatening to bite. You could see him as looking for a fight, or as warning intruders away from his family. At some point in the horse's career all of his legs snapped off. His teeth are still bared, his face still snarling. He was like that in the 1970s when my brother found him in a charity bazaar in Florida and added him to our horse collection.

Later, after noticing that we hadn't actually played with our model horses for a few years, my brother built a good-sized display shelf for the collection. Our best-looking, least play-damaged specimens, and also our loved-all-to-pieces ones, barely fitted onto that shelf. A few surplus animals were left over for our sister and young cousins to play with. Going by the lack of further damage to the wooden horse I'm guessing nobody ever played with him much.

He is an unfriendly-looking, to my eyes ugly, model animal, but he could be cast as the guardian of a herd if a child plays with horses. So I took him to market to see if any horse-struck child wanted him.

So far they haven't.

I'm not surprised. Kids don't seem to collect model animals the way they used to. Adults buy stuffed model animals as pillow substitutes, but model horses in the toy stores have morphed into dreadful cartoonish things my brother and I wouldn't have added to our herd.

People have said, "With the broken legs?"

Well, hello...children's dolls and toy animal often lose legs. What children do, as I recall vividly, is pretend they still have their legs. You're already pretending this wooden or plastic or glass or stuffed-fabric object can run, jump, pose, have adventures, so pretending its legs aren't broken isn't much more of a stretch for your imagination.

What older artists and artisans do, if they prefer, is incorporate broken toys into scenes where the broken ends are either covered or part of the composition. A horse with broken legs and a stressed-out face might be swimming, for example.

But someone said, "With the broken legs, it's sort of scary!" and that blew my mind.

It reminded me of the summer, a few years ago, when the wolves at the Bays Mountain Park became ill. These wolves weren't pets, but they were accustomed to humans and looked as friendly as big dogs to child visitors. Then one day it became obvious that one of them was sick, and a visiting child started to whimper with pity--and the child's grandmother went home and wrote an angry letter to the newspaper saying, not that the sick animal needed privacy or euthanasia (it needed both), but that the park rangers shouldn't allow the sight of a sick animal to "upset" children.

I've wondered, whenever I've remembered that letter, whether by now this grandmother's grandchildren have locked the door and scuttled away from the house where the grandmother was lying at the foot of the stairs. "Ewww, Grandma's not looking good! Ooohhh, scary!"

In years long gone by, Virginia employed a man to remove roadkill from beside roads before it stank, bred flies, and spread diseases. Now people have to do that for themselves. Often they don't. On a road inside the city limits a big female possum was hit by a car and killed. The original accident was a clean blow to the head, but as other vehicles have encountered the deceased possum it's become obvious that she was female and well along in pregnancy. (Possums move and think slowly; it's possible that this one was killed while trying to make up her mind whether she had time to cross the road before giving birth.) I suppose some people think the sight of a slowly drying-out possum placenta full of near-birth fetal possums is "scary" or "unlucky" too. I think it's sad, pitiful...not "scary."

Other living things' injuries and illnesses shouldn't be "scary." I am intimidated by contagious illnesses, but at least I recognize that as a weakness.

One thing that used to give me trouble, when I was actively using my CGNA and CMT certifications, was the idea of patients with AIDS. The official policy is that health care professionals should see them. In real life I'm pretty sure I did see some patients who were HIV-positive, because the incidence of the disease was very high in Washington. In real life, if a person had told me "I am HIV-positive"...it's not that I imagine the virus is airborne, or makes people rabid, or is even necessarily the consequence of bad behavior (although that is the most common means of infection). It's that all healthy people are walking cultures of virus, bacteria, and fungi that don't make us sick but may kill people with AIDS. As a CGNA you have to expect that most of your patients aren't going to be able to give you references, but dash it, I hate losing patients before they're ninety years old. I would not have wanted to do even auric massage--the kind where you never actually touch the patient, but just hold your hand close enough to feel each other's body heat, which is soothing and distracting when patients are very ill--for someone who I knew had AIDS.

So if I'm intimidated by AIDS, why shouldn't other people be intimidated by a toy's broken legs or an animal's blood or a relative's cardiac disease? Right. If they are, they are, and they have to begin where they are. But if what you feel about other living things' weakness or suffering or injury is "Ooohhh, me me me me ME, I'm SCARED," instead of "How can I help them?", I do think that's a weakness, and an unattractive one too.