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I don’t know whether I’d call it lucky or not, but I have been endowed with a sense of the frangible, temporary quality of life since childhood. There is some passage in the Hebrew Union prayerbook we used at our Temple, something like: “We are but a speck of dust in the Almighty’s eye” that I instantly recognized as being true. I don’t think I was older than nine.
Then there were the A-bomb scares. Signs went up in my neighborhood for bomb shelters, ugly yellow signs with the rounded swastika-like design that looked like the plastic disk you had to put on a 45 record to stick on the turntable but that signified radiation, which means there was a bomb, which means time is running short to get somewhere safe.
During the Cuban Missile Conflict people rushed the grocery stores to get supplies so they could hide from nuclear poisoning for enough time for the nuclear clouds to clear, and come out of their shelter. So they could exist somehow after the war with Russia.
I wasn’t old enough yet to read all the wonderful, terrifying and occasionally uplifting science fiction works about After Bomb Worlds so I just thought we were all going to die really soon, a couple of days. I asked my mother why she hadn’t bought extra stuff at the market. There wasn’t much left! We would starve! In our own filth! She laughed and assured me, with her Bronx accent, that if Russia dropped the Bomb on us, we wouldn’t be alive long enough to miss the beans and toilet paper. She had a wonderful sense of humor, my Mother, but she wasn’t always 100/% fixed on what genre was appropriate in a given situation.
Rumors abounded on the Middle School yard on Friday afternoon.. Beth and Kathy and I were all sad that, although we had all been kissed, even French kissed, we all confessed to some over-the-bra action, none of us had fallen truly in love and been loved and especially been-made-love-to by a boy who we were willing to, if not die for, at least die with.
I found myself saying things like: “Wow, I never thought I would die a virgin.”
Beth and Kathy nodded sadly in support. We were almost in tears as we walked home. When we waved goodbye (which was usually just a murmured “’Later’” as we peeled off from one another), this night, we waved sadly, in earnest, not sure if we would ever see each other again, if any of this would even be here after Monday.
When we didn’t die by the time we were 30, we all three heaved sighs of relief, and, in my case, surprise. We had skipped a bullet that time, and other times, but who knew if we would make it through the next one,