Mr. Pickens,
a nurseryman for whom I worked part-time as an adolescent, had moved his field
hands to, well, another field a couple miles north of my house. I vividly
recall bending at the waist, and dropping handfuls of weeds into my empty
bushel basket.
Of course,
I’d been listening to Walter Cronkite, or Huntley and Brinkley each night, and
I had my trusty transistor radio nearby, and as I dragged that basket along in
the heat of the Florida sunshine, the natural peace which accompanied my work
was broken only by a myriad of troubled thoughts which permeated my mind.
With the
advent of the Cuban Missile Crisis, I could imagine the end of the world as I
knew it. I would be slaving in the fields, and as I stood to stretch my back a
bit, and I gazed towards the West,
… A Mushroom
Cloud
would
appear, and intuitively I would understand a city of several hundred thousand
people had simply vanished. The City of Tampa, with all of its inhabitants, was
only a memory now.
And almost
immediately thereafter, as I turned to face the Northeast, a greater explosion
now, and I felt the earth rock beneath me, and though the sun was low on the
horizon, the light which sprang from this ghastly thing renewed the day, and
the awful reds and violets and yellows of that massive cloud almost threatened
to envelope me.
It was the
age of fallout shelters. Americans were building them at an unprecedented rate.
One young lady, whom I fancied as my girlfriend, once gave me a tour of her
family’s fallout shelter. (Funny, fifty years hence, her former home is a
lawyer’s office, and that relic of yesteryear is still standing nearby; a host
of weeds and small seedlings growing out of the roof).
There’s a
phrase, attributed to President Kennedy, which was used at the time to describe
the end of the crisis.
“We were
standing there staring at one another, face to face, and I think the other guy
just blinked.”
And so he
did, and I thank God for it. My life returned to normal, and I continued my
work in those filthy caladium fields. An unsettled peace had descended upon the
land, but it was enough, and my thoughts were redirected towards the former
things; skateboards and comic books and bowling and girls, and a dozen other
small preoccupations.
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