When I was the age of still being impressionable (which I hope is still now) I saw an episode of the Twilight Zone that has stuck with me all these years. I must have been pretty young because we were still living in the original house out on the farm--the tiny one with newspaper in the walls and a slanted-roof converted attic. At some point in time I got a little dual-knob black and white tv. It was awesome...it was perfect. I could get the 4 stations out of the neighboring town; KY3, KSPR33, what is now FOX27, KOLR10, and my favorite, PBS channel 21.

Several years later I would sneak in with my "date" to watch the Twilight Zone movie. Brad Post and I, all of 13, buying our tickets and feeling so cool because we didn't get carded. We were 13! Of course they knew we were 13. Anyway, I faintly remember the movie being a poor one--not worth our age-defying feat. As I remember we even had to come up with a consistant plot for the movie we were supposed to see...just in case someone asked. Like I said, "We were (so) 13!"

So one night in the attic I watched an episode of the Twilight Zone about time. I also watched another one where a Nuclear bomb had gone off and people had hidden in their cellar...and rescuers came because they were going to seal that part of the world off in a big dome...and the people were too afraid to answer their knockings. Thus they were left to die sealed in this nuclear landscape...while the world with it's spring and flowers continued on the other side. It was a national monument or something. A place for parents to take their impressionable children. "You see kids," they would start, "this is why our country is so ani-war now. Thousands of people died in that bubble..."

The episide I really want to write about was the one on time. I guess it was time and secret powers. This lady could stop the world by yelling, "Stop It!" or "Shut Up!" or something along those lines. Everything stopped cold in its tracks. Accidents that were bound to happen didn't happen just yet. Nothing lost its inertia, things were still perpelled after she said the magic word, "Go" or something...but for those few moments inbetween...the world was frozen in time. She could walk between cars about to crash, or beneath trees half blowing over. So of course this is a special power that comes in handy...but not so handy when a nuclear (see the connection now?) warhead is literally a few feet from hitting the earth.

So now there is life and death hanging in the wings. She's saved her town but what to do now? It would have been better to parish with her family at the dinner table than to have complete power over the earth and find yourself alone.

We don't see how she anwers this question...this is what we were left with. The last scene was of her meandering through a pre-nuclear-bomb, mad-dash for survival, city square, with the red and white checkered nose of the warhead dangling in the distance.

So, for just under 20 years, I too have struggled with this moment. Sometimes when my dad was driving us across the desert on vacation or when we would pull into an eerily empty town, my dad would say, "Looks like the rapture happened and we weren't taken." We'd drive through without seeing a car for 70 miles or more. We'd pull into a small one-gas-station town when the sun was going down and find out that this one station was the only industry left, that the liveable houses were liveable but not lived-in. Entire paved streets leading to the old high school that was consolidated into another district, the once-bustling downtown with it's rotting storefronts, and the churches--one the Methodist Church, and the other called, First Baptist, with their weedy cemetaries out back.

It's very similar to driving through a city pre-tornado, a tornado warning that has well-warned. People only out on the streets if they are leaving to take shelter somewhere else. The air is unbelieveably calm, and the streets are empty. Anyone you meet motions to you about the tornado and you nod your head...you are on your way to shelter too. It was my 18th birthday 1994.

Every morning as I get out of bed, I pull back the curtains and open the window to survey the day. Standing there palms on the windowsill, I judged today gorgeous with blue sky. The morning temperature was already the same outside as inside. Then I noticed as nothing in my view moved. It was like a larger-than life photograph. No seeds falling through the air, airplanes overhead, vine-leaves flapping on the chimney, the only cloud in the sky seemed to be steadfast and bored.

I am sure you see the circle of thoughts now, the stopping of my world for a moment on Marialei leading me to think of the woman wondering through the streets with a war-head dangling overhead...in fact it might have been a few feet from earth. Regardless, it's left it's mark, for I was obviously of an impressionable age--watching reruns of an old show in a converted attic bedroom with newspapers in the walls on a dual-knob black and white tv.

Speaking of newspaper...
IN THE NEWS:
Dutch opposition parties were the big winners in Wednesday's elections, exit polls showed, including Christian Democrats and the movement of the slain populist candidate, Pim Fortuyn.