Today, in one of my several times a day foray out onto the porch, listening to the endless breath of the twisted currents of traffic that surround my little town like moat, I thought about survivors. First I thought about the earliest years of my childhood, from 1945 to 1955, the decade after the end of the second World War.
Our parents imbued us with the knowledge that in a day, the world can change: a stock market can crash, endless wind can tear off the fertile top soil of your bread basket, bomb can fall from airplanes piloted by men who are not yet your bitterest enemies. You are fighting what you believe to be your bitterest enemies, the Germans in Europe, and from Asia come ships and planes you never imagined coming and they set fire to your fleet. You are at war in one day, the Day That Will Live in Infamy!
We grew up being protected from what our parents very intimately had experienced as the vicissitudes of life. But we always knew they were there, especially when we heard the sirens in our big brick schools and we all scuttled to the dark, damp basement with the big black roaches, to stay perfectly still until the sirens blasted the all clear.
Now more than ever, I have been daily confronted with my own mortality, and like any responsible older adult, I try to make plans, options, strategies for seeing to the welfare of my pets. Which makes me ever more aware of my own old lady vulnerability.
Like road runner, a cartoon creature of the past that I remember for two scenes only, we can run with the speed of a top fuel racer, but that is no guarantee that we can outrun disaster. Like roadrunner, we could be felled by a black hole that opens in the middle of the desert highway, or squashed by a safe falling, incongruously, out of the blue sky.
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