I didn't develop my bullshit detector until rather late in life. (If I'd had it earlier, I might have avoided a few psychotic girlfriends . . .)
I guess I was about six—this would have been the summer when my family lived with my uncle in Liberty, Utah, as chronicled in Chapter 3 of The Road to Apostasy—and I was helping in the kitchen as lunch was being prepared. I remember scooping a healthy dollop of Miracle Whip out of the jar with a table knife, spreading it on a thick slice of bread, and then tapping the knife on the rim of the glass jar to remove the excess goop. That was when my uncle Dennis descended in his fury.
"Hey, don't do that!" he cried, snatching the jar and the knife away from me. "You could get little glass fragments in the Miracle Whip! Have you ever heard the screams of a man when little bits of glass are working their way through his stomach and his intestines, slicing them up along the way? Draw the flat of the blade across the lip of the jar if you want to get stuff off, like this."
My uncle had been an Airborne Ranger in the Army—at least, that's what he said—and he always made himself come across as though he had witnessed every hideous thing that men could possibly do to one another. The image of that screaming man with broken glass in his guts stayed with me for months afterward, haunting my nights, and I've never tapped a knife against a glass jar since.
It's only now that it occurs to me to wonder if my uncle had ever actually heard the screams of a man when little bits of glass are working their way through this stomach and intestines. I'd put money on not.
Like I said, I didn't develop my bullshit detector until rather late in life. It meant I was a credulous kid, as you can see from this little incident. But I credit that very lack with helping me to develop a vivid and active imagination. Or maybe it was the other way around.
Whatever. I'll take a little gullibility over the loss of my imagination any day.
