One of the journals I keep now I call my Moments Journal. Each entry in that journal is one page long, perhaps three hundred words and focuses on a single moment in my memory. I describe the lead up to the moment, some of the details of the moment itself, and the feelings I had. I remember, for example, the moment at St. George’s Episcopal Church after I had reached the head of the aisle and turned to behold Adele in her wedding dress following me, all smiles. I remember where I was when I learned that JFK had been murdered. I remember being alone in a New York hotel room ten months later and watching the Democratic National Convention sustain an applause for RFK for over twenty minutes.
I can’t place many of the entries in time any more precisely than the year, but, thanks to Wikipedia, the one I wrote this morning I know happened at 10:30 pm, January 10, 1963. The rumpus room had been converted into a preposterous fallout shelter by then, which, while it would do nothing to protect us from the consequences of a nuclear war, did create an unusual environment. In it, fleeing boys could find a sanctuary that could be made to feel remote, silent, secure, and, with the lights out, utterly lightless. In that space, I watched many episodes of Fireball XL5, The Jetsons, and Johnny Quest on our first TV, which was black and white and made of molded black plastic with gold trim. On it, I watched the full fifteen minutes of the Redstone launch in May of 1961. Mom let me be late for school to watch it. The most important aspect of the TV, as you will see in this memory, was that the power switch was simple: pull to turn on, push to turn off.
On that Thursday night, some brothers and I – memory says it was Jeff, Dan, Luke, and I – watched The Twilight Zone. Specifically, the episode was The Thirty-Fathom Grave, in which a US destroyer patrolling in the south Pacific detects noises from below. Research proves that in this area, a US submarine, twenty years before, had been sunk by the Japanese. The captain of the destroyer had been assigned to the submarine when it had been sunk, but he had fallen off the sub before it had submerged and then destroyed. The captain blamed himself, because of an error he had made, for the destruction of the sub. Now he hallucinates that the ghosts of his fellow sailors were calling to him by banging a hammer on the inside of the hull of the submerged wreck. (I get goosebumps recalling the show.) Eventually, he throws himself overboard and swims to his death to atone.
After the show ended, as a squealing mob, the four of us fled the rumpus room to seek the safety of our mother, who in her callous indifference to our fear instructed us to go turn off the TV and get ready for bed. As if any of us would be able to sleep. We pled for mercy, but none was shown. The problem of turning off the TV was aggravated by the design of the bomb shelter. The clever designers had determined that a simple el-shaped wall, that didn’t even go clear to the ceiling and permitted a person to simply walk around the wall to enter the shelter, was sufficient to stop drifting, glowing, marble-sized, bits of radioactive fallout. The wall created a twelve-foot no-man’s zone that would have to be bravely traversed, somehow, to turn off the TV. We may have been scared out of our wits, but we had enough wits about us to solve the problem. We tied together a broomstick, a hockey stick, and a yardstick, which was long enough to be guided by extended and trembling hands of several boys to deliver the simple punch that would turn off the set. Of course, mission accomplished, we fled again as a squealing mob, back up the stairs to safety. I imagine Mom was obliged on the following morning to find, wonder about, and disassemble the broom, hockey stick, and yard stick.
My feelings were the thrill of fear, the joy of working with a team of brothers, and the amusement about the overall hilarity of the moment.
There were good times, too.